- Stewart and Lynda Resnick made their fortune growing pistachios, oranges, and pomegranates. They’re now the subject of anti-Semitic attacks that stem from their stake in a water bank in Southern California.
As the wildfires in Los Angeles spread, so did an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about the founders of one of California’s largest agriculture businesses.
Stewart and Lynda Resnick are the owners of the Wonderful Company, which has sprawling farmlands in the San Joaquin Valley and owns brands like POM and Fiji Water. They have been falsely accused of hoarding water and exacerbating the wildfire crisis currently plaguing the Los Angeles area.
Because of agriculture’s heavy reliance on water, a critical resource in fighting wildfires, the Resnicks became the targets for false claims on social media that they “control” the water in California. They do not, Fortune can report.
Many of the false claims stem from a misunderstanding of the couple’s ownership of a water bank two hours north of Los Angeles and the sheer size of the Wonderful Company. A large share of the attacks were also anti-Semitic in nature.
"There's a lot of finger-pointing and sort of like picking who you don’t like and blaming them," said Brad Franklin, a water resource economist and research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. "It's silly to pick one major water user in the San Joaquin Valley" and say it's their fault.
Seth Oster, chief corporate affairs officer for the Wonderful Company, said there was "zero truth" to the notion that any person or company controls California's water.
"It’s hard to be surprised anymore by the disinformation and ignorance on social media, but in this case, the hamster wheel has spun to a new level of absurdity," he told Fortune. "We’re headquartered in Los Angeles, and our colleagues have also lost homes and been displaced. But even in the chaos and uncertainty, no one should be allowed to spread uninformed, discredited, and false claims often openly rooted in anti-Semitism."
With an estimated $6 billion in revenue and 175,000 square acres of farmland, 130,000 of which are in California, the Wonderful Company is one of the largest agricultural businesses in the state, growing pistachios, almonds, pomegranates, and citrus fruits.
The company used approximately 150 billion gallons of water in 2021, according to an estimate cited by Forbes. (A company spokesperson said estimates for 2022 and 2023 were in line with the 2021 figures.) The Wonderful Company uses less than 1% of the state's water, Oster said.
According to California's Department of Water Resources (DWR), reservoirs statewide were holding 23.9 million acre-feet of water, or about 7.79 trillion gallons. That figure does not include current statewide ground water levels, where capacity is far greater. California's total ground water is estimated at 850 million to 1.3 billion acre-feet, according to the DWR.
Through the Wonderful Company, the Resnicks—who have a combined net worth of $12.6 billion, according to Forbes—own a 57% stake in the Kern Water Bank Authority, which manages a series of reservoirs and pipes near Bakersfield, Calif., that can store up to about 488 billion gallons of water.
The water bank is a public-private partnership that includes several local water districts. It collects water during rainier years for use during drought periods when supplies are low, and operates on the same principle as a financial bank—except instead of storing money, it stores water.
The water bank "of course contains a large amount of water but there’s no direct connection between [the Resnicks and the water bank] and what’s going on in Southern California," Franklin said. "There's no real reason to believe things would be different if the Resnicks or any other large agricultural businesses used less water."
Additionally, none of that water would have been used to fight the Los Angeles wildfires because the city has enough local supply to fight the fires, according to Jay Lund, vice director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis. “Maybe just a few molecules that made it into the air are being used to fight the wildfires,” Lund said.
L.A. has enough water to fight the fires
Los Angeles would not need water from the water bank or elsewhere because it is using locally stored water to fight the fires. There is enough water in the underground basin beneath the city to supply their efforts to extinguish the fires, Lund said.
Joe Butkiewicz, general manager of the Kern Water Bank, said it was "misguided to turn attention to one of several water banks in California when Los Angeles has the water supply it needs for municipal and emergency purposes."
So far, firefighters have struggled with the fires because there are so many to extinguish at once. The severity of the fires is due to a confluence of events: an extended drought, a very dry winter so far, and the powerful Santa Ana winds blowing into Southern California that created extreme weather conditions that made the fires unmanageable.
Firefighters are facing issues getting the water where they need it, rather than with getting enough of it. Firefighting efforts stumbled because the city's infrastructure was unable to supply sufficient water quickly enough to the needed areas. Parts of Los Angeles, in particular Pacific Palisades, found themselves struggling with a lack of water pressure that left fire hydrants dry, as firefighters tried to put out surrounding fires, as reported by the Los Angeles Times.
The municipal water system was built to fight fires that engulf single homes, not entire neighborhoods. The situation was worsened by the fact there are at least five fires raging simultaneously. The largest of which, the Palisades fire in northern Los Angeles, is roughly 21,600 square acres.
“We pushed the system to the extreme," Los Angeles Department of Water and Power chief executive officer and chief engineer Janisse Quiñones told reporters in a press conference Thursday. "Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure.”
Even if additional water were needed, it would be impractical to get it from the Kern Water Bank to the areas hit by wildfires because it is about 150 miles from Los Angeles and separated by the San Gabriel Mountains, Lund said.
Butkiewicz echoed those sentiments. "The logistical and operational needs required to move water from a water bank in Kern County to Los Angeles in a timely manner can only be suggested by those who aren’t informed on how water infrastructure works," he said.
The claims against the Resnicks are not the only pieces of misinformation circulating online in the aftermath of the wildfires. The fires and the ensuing chaos have proven fertile territory for misleading information at a time when people turned to social media in search of reliable information.
“If we had this much bunk to spread over the wildfire areas we would have put it out by now,” Lund said.
More on the California wildfires:
- California bans insurance cancellation in LA fire-affected areas
- Son and father-in-law fleeing fire couldn’t get a ride from Uber or 911, then kind strangers stepped in to save them—twice
- Man arrested for arson by LAPD at site of major Californian fire
- Victims of the Pacific Palisades fire face another harsh reality: No insurance to rebuild
- The best way to claim insurance if you lost your home or business in the Los Angeles wildfires
