January 04, 2005
Don't drink the water!
Today’s Miami Herald has a little puff piece on Crystal Springs, which provides much of the drinking water for Tampa and lots of profits for Perrier and Nestle.
The Herald piece marvels at the pristine beauty of the area, and lauds the current owners for making the spring available to a few lucky people each year. Unfortunately, the article leaves out a big chunk of history, and completely ignores the fact that the spring was usurped by greedy capitalists 8 decades ago, but I’m happy to fill in the gaps.
Stolen from the public in the 1920's, Crystal Springs has never been able to escape its various owners’ avarice over the years, and remains mired in controversy even today.
Florida springs can be pretty spectacular places. With millions of gallons of fresh water flowing daily, they make up the headwaters of rivers, provide drinking water for millions, and create unique environments for a wide variety of flora, fauna, and recreating humans.
Crystal Springs is a typical Florida spring. It feeds Tampa’s Hillsborough River, the primary source for the city’s water, providing the majority of its flow in the dry season. It teems with life, and the clear waters provide perfect conditions for snorklers and more casual observers. In years past, the spring has been a popular swimming hole, fishing spot and picnic area, despite the fact that it has been privately controlled for decades.
The original developer of the land, who sold plots for farming from 1915 or so onward, promised free access to the springs for perpetuity, and even promised to turn over ownership to the citizens once a certain threshold was met. At one point, the spring was legally declared a park and preserve, but ultimately, the developer, A. B. Hawk, was unable or unwilling to make good on his promises, and after some very shady litigation and title transfers, the spring ended up in private hands.
By the mid 1920's, a man aptly named Waters legally owned the rights and was already closing off the area and bottling water from the spring. Residents responded by repeatedly tearing down his fence.
Ownership changed hands over the years, and in 1975 the spring was bought by its current owners, the Thomas family. The Thomas family makes money by selling bottling rights to Perrier / Nestle, and this water is sold under the Zephyrhills brand name.
The Thomas’s closed the spring area to the public several years ago. Many say that the park was closed in order to hide the increasingly industrial nature of Perrier’s pumping program.
Perrier was originally operating under a permit that allowed 300,000 gallons of water to be taken daily. They wanted lots more, but were denied a permit to increase their pumping to over 3 million gallons a day in the 1990's. Various courts found that this level of pumping could adversely affect the water supply for Tampa and surrounding areas.
Somehow, though, they were able to wrangle permission to increase pumping somewhat as long as they replaced to water they took with an adequate substitute, so now they truck in water stolen from up the road and dump it into the Hillsborough river (pdf file) to replace what they’re stealing from the spring. Someone, somewhere saw this as a logical solution.
Anyway, the Thomas family is all about making as much money as possible form the land which they control, and this means increasing the amount of water they can legally draw from the spring. Part of this fight involves public relations, and so, in order to be seen as good stewards of the land, they now let hand picked groups of students and other academic types enter the area to interact with nature.
Then they con news outlets into running happy little stories that make it seem as if the Thomas family is more interested in preservation than environmental rape. These stories will be prominently featured the next time a permit for increased pumping is sought, and the family will be portrayed as misunderstood environmentalists who are actually doing us all a favor by stealing our drinking water and selling it back to us in an overpriced Zephyrhills bottle.
Lots more info here. (Compare to the fake history according to Nestle.)
You can help by not consuming Zephyrhills brand water. Nestle, which killed third world babies in the 1970's with its misleading marketing for baby formula, is also infamous for sucking springs dry, destroying local ecosystems around the US and the world all in the name of corporate profits.
Today, most people see no problem in the fact that corporations have figured out a way to charge premium prices for a basic necessity of life. Not everyone can afford to pay corporate prices for clean water, but much of society shrugs carelessly as companies like Nestle steal what is rightfully ours and sell it back in pretty packages to the lucky few.
