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Who are the Resnicks, the billionaires blamed for the lack of water to fight the fires in Los Angeles?

Who are the Resnicks, the billionaires blamed for the lack of water to fight the fires in Los Angeles?

As Los Angeles' water hydrant runs dry as firefighters battle devastating wildfires, art collectors and billionaires Lynda and Stewart Resnick are facing criticism for their water usage habits and private water storage tanks. Many experts say the criticism is unfounded.

The Resnicks are owners of the Wonderful Company, a conglomerate valued at up to six billion dollars. With a total fortune of $13 billion, the Resnicks are the richest farming family in California.

They own about 185 acres of land and are majority owners of the Kern Water Bank, a water reservoir on about 20 acres in the San Joaquin Valley, about a two-hour drive north of Los Angeles, writes artnet.


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Since building their agricultural empire, they have also become known as great supporters of the arts. They collect works by European artists, the walls of their Beverly Hills home are decorated with works by Picasso, Jean-Honore Fragonard and François Boucher, and Artnews has listed them among the top 200 art collectors.

They are also generous donors to museums in Los Angeles. The Hammer Museum has received about $30 million from the Resnicks over the years, while the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has received about $90 million.

The Resnick Exhibition Pavilion at LACMA was designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano. It opened in 2010 and covers an area of ​​one acre, making it the largest naturally lit, freestanding museum space in the world.

The Resnicks also regularly donate to environmental causes. In 2019, they donated $750 million to Caltech for climate research, the Telegraph reports.

Despite this, the Resnicks have often been the focus of criticism for their farming practices and the profits they have made since a 2016 investigation by Mother Jones revealed that the Wonderful Company uses more water than any other company in California. In 1994, the Resnicks acquired a 57 percent stake in Kern, then a public water reservoir that was on the verge of closure, in exchange for supplying water to users in California.

Today, Kern provides the Resnicks with excellent access to water, enabling them to irrigate 130 acres of farmland. Some critics and activists claim that the couple’s negotiations with state officials and water district leaders were “secret.”

As the effects of climate change have become more apparent in recent years, and droughts in Southern California have become more frequent, public outcry has erupted against the Resnicks’ philanthropy at LACMA and the Hammer. Following last week’s historic fires in Los Angeles that drained fire hydrants, critics have raised concerns about the vast amount of water Wonderful Company collects and uses.

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“The Resnicks are powerful, and their control over so much water is absurd,” said Yasha Levine, director of the upcoming documentary Pistachio Wars.

Collecteurs, an online art platform that bills itself as the world’s first “collective digital museum,” shared an Instagram post on Jan. 14 that mentions the Resnicks’ connections to the art world and claims they own “almost all the water in California.” The post also includes references to their support for Israel, particularly amid the war in Gaza.

Regarding claims that the Resnicks’ Kern Water Bank shares have anything to do with the Los Angeles fires, Seth Oster of Wonderful Company told Fortune magazine that “it’s hard to be surprised by the misinformation and ignorance on social media, but in this case it’s reached a new level of absurdity.” Oster added that “the false claims against the company are often deeply rooted in anti-Semitism.”

Los Angeles gets its water from a network of 114 reservoirs, including Kern, and all were fully filled before the fires broke out last week. Jay Lund of the University of California, Davis, told Fortune that water from Kern could not have been used to fight the fires because it is separated from Los Angeles by the San Gabriel Mountains.

Wonderful Company: This is misinformation

Wonderful Company has issued a statement, discrediting concerns about water use as "misinformation and ignorance on social media," noting that the company is headquartered in Los Angeles, so its employees have lost their homes and been displaced due to the fires.

"There is no truth in the fact that any individual or company, much less us, owns or controls the majority of the water in California. It is also not true that we have any connection to the water distributed to Los Angeles. Water that is intended for municipal use is not used for agricultural purposes or food production," the statement said.

The Wonderful Company claims to use less than one percent of California's water and produce more than a quarter of the state's food. The company confirmed it owns a 57 percent stake in the Kern Water Bank and said it conserves water that would otherwise end up in the ocean.

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The latest fires, believed to be the most destructive in Los Angeles history, have killed at least 24 people, destroyed thousands of structures and forced an estimated 180 people to evacuate. Officials say the response to the fires has been limited not by a lack of water, but by the city's water system simply not being able to handle the large amounts of water it needs in a short amount of time.

"The system is not designed to fight wildfires that affect residential communities," said Martin Adams, former director of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

On Friday, California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered an independent investigation into the loss of water pressure and the empty Santa Ynez Reservoir in Pacific Palisades, where the largest fire has not yet been fully contained. /Telegraph/