Nestle pipes water from national forest, sparking protests.
Dressed in bright colors and holding homemade signs, they held hose posts for the rest of the afternoon, aiming to draw drivers’ attention to an effort to get Nestle Waters to stop pumping water out of the San Bernardino National Forest.
Local activist and organizer Glen Thompson said many people, including himself, were angry that while Nestle paid to run water pipes through the national forest, the company paid no fee for the water rights.
Jimi Sunderland, co-coordinator for local activist network Indivisible San Bernardino Mountains, said the issue was personal for her, as she lived and was raising her children in the area.
“The water is on National Forest Service land, it belongs to all people.
This is everyone in California’s water,” he said.
Nestle’s long pumped from the forrest Nestle Waters North America, the nation’s largest seller of bottled water, has long piped water out of the San Bernardino National Forest to produce Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water.
The issue prompted a federal lawsuit, an investigation of the company’s water rights claims by state regulators and a review of a Forest Service permit allowing the company to continue using its wells, pipelines and water collection tunnels in the forest.
The agency has yet to establish what the annual fee would be under the new permit.
Nestle says it collected about 32 million gallons of water from Arrowhead Springs in 2016.