Save the California Delta Alliance (STCDA)

Please view this video:

Nestle Steals Water; excerpt from FLOW, an excerpt from the 2008 Sundance Film Festival documentary “For the Love of Water”. The message is pertinant because, as we reported in the post Sacramento has Excess Water? earlier today, Nestlé just signed a 10-year agreement with Sacrmento to open a new bottling plant which will use Delta water to bottle. This film shows what happened when Nestlé opened a bottling plant in Massachusetts (very scary) and raises the question of who owns water and who gets to make decisions about water.

It’s not just in Massachusetts – there is a YouTube video from Ontario, Canada about Nestle collapsing the groundwater aquivers

“We have fundamental problems with profiting from water, which is a public resource,” said Emily Wurth, water-program director at Food and Water Watch, a Washington, D.C., research and advocacy group that opposes privatizing water utilities and bottling water.

We need to make it illegal for water rights to be privatized.

To view the FLOW video, click here.

“Excess” tap water in Sacramento, Calif., is helping supply a new Nestlé bottling plant.

The new bottling plant initially will bottle up to 150 acre-feet of water annually, purchased from the city of Sacramento and from nearby private springs.

The bottler signed a 10-year lease with options to extend. That’s another water contract state agencies have signed continuing the process of over-committing water we don’t have.

This may have been a wet year, but has everyone forgotten the past four years of drought or the July 20th State Water Report that says the Delta needs more water flowing through it than is currently allowed due to excess water exports?

If Sacramento has excess water, why do they need four new pumps? The four new Freeport pumps near Sacramento are anticipated to go on-line in 2011. The pumps are a joint project by the Sacramento County Water Agency (SCWA) and the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) of Oakland to supply 85 million gallons of water per day from the Sacramento River to customers in central Sacramento County and the East Bay area of California.

We’re in a state water crisis! We need to be importing bottled water into California from water-rich states. There is no “excess” water here.