Groundwater Gold Rush

This is the first article in a Bloomberg Green series investigating how private investors are commandeering public water for profit

Banks, pension funds and insurers have been turning California’s scarce water into enormous profits, leaving people with less to drink

As storms battered California in March, the state’s inland breadbasket erupted with almond blossoms. It happens every year. The Central Valley—the source of 40% of America’s fruit and nuts—explodes in a riot of pink and white blooms. This year petals fluttered off branches into raging irrigation ditches that only a few months earlier had twisted across the dry dust like coils of snake molt.

California has a temporary reprieve. At the Woodville Public Utility District, 60 miles southeast of Fresno, Ralph Gutierrez has watched these cycles of flood and drought for decades. Gutierrez, 65, who grew up picking tomatoes and grapes with his parents in the nearby fields, has spent the past 43 years operating water systems for some of the poorest communities in the state. He’s a well whisperer. Brawny, with a tattooed forearm, a silver belt buckle and Western boots, Gutierrez coaxes water from stone aquifers that have been hammered for years by agricultural pollution and overpumping.

He’s a well whisperer… with a tattooed forearm, a silver belt buckle and Western boots. Gutierrez coaxes water from stone aquifers that have been hammered.

He took over Woodville’s 500 or so household hookups in 2001, when the water table beneath the small farmworker community’s well field was about 100 feet below the surface. The district’s two community wells, powered by electric pumps, produced ample clean groundwater for residential taps. Since then, California has experienced its driest pair of decades in 1,200 years, and the water level has dropped to almost 200 feet. One Woodville well dried up and cracked two years ago. The second was shut down because of nitrate contamination.

Last year almost 1,500 domestic wells went dry statewide, and the state auditor reported almost a million Californians had no safe drinking water in their homes. Today the people of Woodville drink bottled water.

This winter’s record storms, a welcome break from drought, lifted Woodville’s water level 18 feet. It will take decades of wet winters to refill the aquifer. For drought is only part of California’s water woes.

The other part unspools outside the window of Gutierrez’s white Toyota Tundra, on a drive through Woodville’s outskirts. Each side of the road is covered in dense thickets of almond, pistachio and walnut orchards that have grown to dominate the landscape in the past few decades. The nut trees are known as “permanent crops,” because they need copious, year-round irrigation over the course of their 30-year life span. That’s in contrast to […]

Full article: Groundwater Gold Rush