Nestle Waters pipes water out of the San Bernardino National Forest using a permit that lists an expiration date of 1988. Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — Three advocacy groups are suing
the
The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in
The lawsuit comes more than seven months after an investigation by The Desert Sun revealed that Nestle has been drawing water from the San Bernardino National Forest using a permit that lists an expiration date of 1988.
The groups say in the lawsuit that the Forest Service should stop Nestle’s use of the water pipeline “unless and until it issues a valid special use permit.”
“It’s basically an unpermitted use, an unlawful use,” Lisa Belenky, a lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a telephone interview.
Forest Service Press Officer John Heil responded to an email about the lawsuit saying: “We cannot discuss ongoing or pending litigation.”
The Forest Service in August said it planned to begin
studying the renewal of the company’s permit under the
The defendants named in the lawsuit also include Regional
Forester
Nestle, based in
The company has said its 1978 permit continues to be in legally “in full force and effect” until the Forest Service acts on it.
Water from Arrowhead Springs has been tapped and sold for more than a century. Nestle’s permit — the latest in a series of permits dating back to the 1930s — was issued to its predecessor Arrowhead Puritas Waters, Inc., for the purpose of maintaining more than four miles of water pipelines, water collection tunnels and horizontal wells in the national forest.
The Forest Service, which does not collect fees for water use, has been charging Nestle an annual permit fee of $524.
Nestle draws the water from a series of wells high on the
mountainside above Strawberry Creek. The water runs through
a pipeline down the rocky canyon and fills a tank, where
trucks fill up and haul the water to a bottling plant in
The company has said it bottled nearly 25 million gallons from the springs in the national forest last year, on average about 68,000 gallons a day. That was down from about 27 million gallons during 2013.
Critics including former Forest Service employees have been calling for a thorough environmental review, arguing the company shouldn’t be allowed to keep taking unchecked amounts of water from public lands, particularly during California’s extreme drought. Some environmentalists have demanded the agency order an immediate halt to the extraction of water until it can assess the impacts on a stream and wildlife in the national forest north of San Bernardino.
In the lawsuit, the groups say that “removal of large amounts of water at the highest elevations of the watershed is having an environmental impact at the well, borehole, and tunnel sites as well as throughout the entire downstream watershed.” Threatened animals that depend on the water in the ecosystem range from mountain yellow-legged frogs to birds such as willow flycatchers and California spotted owls.
Nestle has insisted its bottling operation isn't causing any harm and has said it’s in discussions with the Forest Service about the permit renewal process.
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