Utility sells to water bottler

APRIL 5, 2006 | Former Maine state legislator Jim Wilfong is blogging about the high price of water and what its sale could mean to the water supply of small communities. He cites a visit to east Texas where water outprices oil 10-1, then a return to Maine and the problems of the small town of Fryeburg.
"Water giants are on the move in Maine, around the country, and around the world. The gold rush to own and control the world's most essential resource is on; and the giants have had at least a decade's head start," he writes. He goes on:

The citizens of Fryeburg Maine are supplied by a small privately owned utility. This company also sells to Pure Mountain Springs, a private water company that in turn sells to Nestle. They have two pumps coming from the same spring source. In the middle of the winter two years ago, one of the pumps broke down. Guess who didn't have water for two days and who was under an order to boil water for four more? If you guessed that that two nursing homes; the grade school, middle school and high school; and all of the households and small businesses in the village were hauling water with fire trucks and livestock trucks to keep the flushes going, you would be right.
Meanwhile, Nestlé's trailer trucks rolled to their plant in Massachusetts 24/7 without interruption. That's what's coming if corporations continue to get control of our state's water.

National Democratic political consultant Joe Trippi seized on this situation on his blog as well.','

TAKING ON THE MEXICO CITY FORUM A guest opinion in the Cook County News Herald of Grand Marais, Minnesota, blasted the approach taken at the March Fourth World Water Forum in Mexico City which equated water rights with human rights.
"After the first day of the meeting, however, it became clear that the government and corporate agents were only interested in turning water management into a business opportunity, whereupon the NGOs and activists established an alternative forum intent on identifying access to clean water as a fundamental right . . . If we accept the position that water is a common good, and an inalienable right shared by all people, does that mean that folks in China or France have as much right to Lake Superior’s water as we do?
Perhaps we would be better served if we didn’t use the concept of human rights to justify our control of Lake Superior’s water, but rather, focused on Cibber’s observation that possession is eleven points in the law."