Virtual Issues

Can you imagine a war, a real shooting war, over water, maybe even your water?

Ever wondered who owns the water in the underground source, known as an aquifer, that supplies
your well and drinking water system? Who gets access to water during drought and shortages? If your
local government can limit a developer’s access to dwindling water supplies to build new homes?
The answers to these questions vary from state to state and are rarely simple. The rights to ground
water are governed by state statutes and case law that have evolved over the last century. Today,
states generally follow one of five “rules” in deciding “Who Owns the Water?”

The Absolute Dominion Rule

Permits a landowner to intercept ground water that would otherwise have been available to a neigh-
boring water user and even to monopolize the yield of an aquifer without incurring liability.
Eight states adopted or indicated a preference for the Absolute Dominion rule: Connecticut, Indiana,
Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Rhode Island and Texas.

The Reasonable Use Rule

Limits a landowner’s use of water to those uses that have a reasonable relationship to the use of the
overlying land. The rule is essentially the rule of absolute ownership with exceptions for wasteful and
off-site use.

Twenty-one states adopted or indicated a preference for the Reasonable Use rule: Alabama, Arizona,
Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Four of these states adopted the Reasonable Use rule in conjunction with the Prior Appropriation rule: Arkansas, Delaware, Missouri and Wyoming. Another state, Nebraska, adopted a Reasonable Use rule in conjunction with the Correlative Rights rule.

The Correlative Use Rule

Maintains that the authority to allocate water is held by the courts. Owners of overlying land and non-
owners or transporters have co-equal or correlative rights in the reasonable, beneficial use of ground
water. A major feature of this doctrine is the concept that adjoining lands can be served by a single
aquifer. Therefore, the judicial power to allocate water permits protects both the public’s interest and
the interests of private users.

Six states adopted or indicated a preference for the Correlative Rights rule: California, Hawaii, Iowa,
Minnesota, New Jersey and Vermont.

The Restatement of Torts Rule

Holds that a landowner who uses ground water for a beneficial purpose is not subject to liability for
interference if certain conditions are met. The water withdrawal cannot cause unreasonable harm to
a neighbor by lowering the water table or reducing artesian pressure, cannot exceed a reasonable
share of the total store of ground water and cannot create a direct and substantial effect on a water-
course or lake.

Three states adopted or indicate a preference for the Restatement of Torts doctrine: Michigan, Ohio
and Wisconsin.

Laboratory tests on ten brands of bottled water purchased in nine states and the District of Columbia detected bacteria and 38 pollutants often found in tap water, some at levels no better than tap water, a study released Wednesday by the Environmental Working Group found.

The pollutants identified include common urban wastewater pollutants like caffeine and pharmaceuticals, an array of cancer-causing byproducts from municipal tap water chlorination, heavy metals and minerals including arsenic and radioactive isotopes, fertilizer residue and a broad range of industrial chemicals. Four brands were also contaminated with bacteria.

 Who owns the water, Suez, Vivendi, RWE or you or me?

Editor’s Note:
This Article was written Tuesday, August 20, 2002 By Mort Rosenblum, Associated Press and should not be hidden nor forgotten.  Please read this because the question of Water is going to be more prevalent every day. Stay tuned for more on Water and I wonder what you’re going to think when you see what I’ve discovered.

Think About This!
“ The Tyrant is often a weak little man. He has no special qualities that set him apart from anyone else – yet the gullible idolize him.”    Éttiene de la Boétie

PARIS — In a world fast running short of fresh water, a new debate rages: Private companies are free to exploit oil, “black gold,” but what about the infinitely more valuable resource of “blue gold”?

Two French companies alone — Suez and Vivendi Environnement — supply water to 230 million people around the globe, from U.S. cities like Atlanta to urban centers across the Third World.

Hardly noticed a few years ago, the issue of water privatization is likely to be a big topic at the United Nations’ World Summit on Sustainable Development that begins Monday in Johannesburg, South Africa.

It raises a deceptively simple question: Is water a human right or a commodity? “The problem is that it’s both,” said Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute in Berkeley, Calif. Everyone has a right to safe, clean water, he said, but because of government failures, 1.1 billion people lack access to it.

A new trend is clear. Both Suez and Vivendi expect double-digit annual growth in their water business, and each already has contracts that add up to more than $10 billion a year. Puerto Rico just hired Suez to distribute its water.

RWE, a German energy conglomerate, is buying small water companies to challenge the French companies. Hundreds of other private operators hold concessions to pump, treat, and distribute water.

Although companies are granted rights to market water — not ownership of the water itself — Gleick and others worry that an inevitable expansion of the private sector might escape essential public control. “Privatization has the potential to grow enormously because of the desperate need for water in the developing world, but water is too important to be left in purely private hands,” Gleick said.

The World Bank, U.N. agencies, and a number of governments support a concept they call PPP, short for public-private partnerships. They encourage companies to invest heavily in the pumps, mains, and other infrastructure for delivering water in exchange for profit. In many big cities, up to half the water is lost to leaks and broken mains. Billing is often chaotic. Public water utilities, usually short of cash and expertise, struggle to meet fast-growing demand.

Suez and Vivendi each point to cases around the world where they have expanded service, sometimes with lower rates. Both insist that they sell service, not water, and stress that they operate on concessions that must be renewed. They say better systems mean that many poor people now have access to reliable water for much less than they paid itinerant vendors.

“We have the money and the expertise, and we believe we can manage water better than states can,” said Jacques Petry, head of Ondeo, Suez’s water division. “We don’t own these resources. We manage them and protect them.” But Ondeo’s American subsidiary faced a storm of protest after it took over Atlanta’s water supply in 1999. Consumers reported mysterious cuts, confused billing, and long delays for service.

Managing water is a business fraught with economic and cultural complexities. A 2000 uprising in Cochabamba, Bolivia, underlines the dangers. Consumers revolted when Bechtel doubled water rates. Seven people died in violence, and the U.S. company lost its concession.

Canadian activist Maude Barlow, author of the book Blue Gold, makes her position clear in its subtitle: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water. While agreeing the private sector has some role to play, she says water must remain firmly in public hands with no confusion between human right and commercial asset. “You can’t have both as equal in law,” she said.

In 2000, Barlow praised the Cochabamba uprising in glowing terms. Today, she acknowledges, the current cooperative-run water system is in shambles, with neither capital nor experience. “Why can you find money for a private company and not a public company?” she asked, arguing that international agencies should help local authorities run their water utilities.

Other activists worry there is a flaw in the logic of privatization: If companies make money by delivering water, won’t their incentive be to sell as much as they can rather than to conserve a scarce resource?

But William Cosgrove, a Canadian consultant who helped draft the World Water Vision paper for an environment summit last year in the Hague, Netherlands, insists that most people, company executives included, believe water is a basic right. “This is controversial simply because it’s not understood,” he said. “As long as it is accepted that governments set up regulatory frameworks and define objectives, they can make the best use of water they have.”

Executives at Suez and Vivendi agree. Jean-Luc Trancart, a Suez spokesman with long experience in French water management, argues that private companies fill a vital need. “I always tell activists if they really want to hurt us, they should make the public sector work better,” he said.

Pierre Victoria, community relations director at Vivendi, says government must take a regulatory role and argues that private management is bound to fail if people do not see better service at fair rates.

In the long term, said Gleick at the Pacific Institute, private companies are not likely to be the prime movers. Already, he said, large American cities with good municipal systems are thinking twice about privatization. “If the big-profile examples like Atlanta get ugly, that will slow things down fast,” he said.

And business opportunities are limited in countries without strong civil societies. “They’ll pick the low-hanging fruit: the municipal systems already in operation but in need of expertise or cash, serving middle and upper class segments of society,” Gleick said. “The poor will continue to be left out.”