Banks, pension funds and insurers have been turning California’s scarce water into enormous profits, leaving people with less to drink
In 2012 scientists working on restoring the nearby San Joaquin River for the US Bureau of Reclamation discovered that the Sack Dam was sinking several inches a year. The subsidence threatened an irrigation system serving 50,000 acres of farmland. The eventual suspected culprit: Hancock’s deep-water extraction beneath Triangle T. Farmers and irrigation districts on the river’s west side threatened to sue Hancock if it didn’t reduce the pumping.
Across the valley to the east, Hancock and other institutional investors continue to plumb the deep aquifer with little restraint. Near Woodville, construction has begun on an almost $300 million repair of a stretch of the Friant-Kern Canal. State officials say overpumping by farms has caused subsidence along the vital artery, which carries water 152 miles from a Sierra dam above Fresno to Bakersfield.
To knowingly go into a region like that and drill deeper wells really tests the limits of corporate ethics, said its water use at its Woodville-area farm has become more efficient by its replacement of 14 older wells with five new ones, as well as its installation of drip irrigation systems and its fallowing 60 acres for groundwater recharge.
The buckling is expected to cost almost $900 million to fix. Officials blame the problem on the rampant expansion of permanent croplands. “What we are doing is more than we are able to sustain,” Yarbrough says.
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