The federal government has backed up California state regulators in ordering the company that bottles Arrowhead water to stop drawing from the San Bernardino Mountains.
Though BlueTriton Brands draws from springs in the mountains that have been used for bottled water since 1906, environmental activists have claimed the removal of that water is harming wildlife, particularly Strawberry Creek.
About a year ago, California’s Water Resources Control Board ordered BlueTriton to stop using the water, which flows through public lands like the San Bernardino National Forest.
On Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the U.S. Forest Service has denied BlueTriton’s permit to extract water from San Bernardino Mountains springs.
While environmental activists are cheering, BlueTriton released a statement to the Times decrying the decision and claiming it’s “unsupported by facts.”
“BlueTriton Brands and its predecessors ‘have continuously operated under a series of special use permits for nearly a century,'” the company told the Times in an email.
In a statement to KTLA Thursday morning, a spokesperson for BlueTriton Brands said that “responsible and proactive water stewardship is central to everything we do.”
“The findings and robust data set developed through these multi-year hydrological and ecological studies, some of which are ongoing, show no material difference between environmental and habitat conditions in the Strawberry Canyon watershed where we operate and the adjacent canyons where we do not operate.
“These studies prove that our careful stewardship of the water and land for over 100 years has not negatively affected the Strawberry Canyon environment,” the spokesperson said. “Credible evidence to the contrary has never been presented.”
