Painting the Roses Red. California Super Rich in Drought Denial.

And painting the grass green.  If you have enough money, you can deny that you live in a desert, for a while.

Telegraph:

Each morning at the crack of dawn, trucks laden with precious H₂O trundle down lanes towards parched estates.

The buyers are paying up to $80 (£49) a unit – a unit is 748 gallons – for water that normally costs a maximum of $6.86 (£4.23) a unit from the water district.

The trucks are now a common sight in Montecito, passing by Sotheby’s International Realty and an haute couture clothes store. But the origin of the water is something of a mystery.

“I see the trucks every day. They’re like big gas trucks with a water sign on,” said Tori Delgado, who works in the Montecito wine and cheese shop. “But nobody knows where they’re getting it from.”

The water is likely being sold by private individuals elsewhere in California who have wells on their properties.

But wherever it comes from the buyers appear to be staving off the inevitable only temporarily, and many millionaires are turning to conservation instead. Miss Winfrey is prominent among them.

“Two months ago she just said, ‘Turn off the water’, and now there’s not a green blade of grass on that lawn,” a resident who has seen her parched garden told the Telegraph.

At Miss Winfrey’s second and larger Montecito estate – an $85 million affair called Promised Land – the grass is still green but the water bill has also fallen dramatically.

The Montecito Water District has so far banned the watering of gardens in the middle of the day, filling swimming pools at any time, and the building of new homes.

Meanwhile scores of angry residents have lodged appeals for more water. One asked for a supply to save 300 specimen trees – but was told the trees would have to die.

a few paragraphs down, a particularly poignant complaint.

“We cut back. We don’t water anything any more,” he said. “The polo field is brown. We are still able to play but it doesn’t play as good.”

Several million dollars of landscaping has also not been watered. Mr Nesbitt accused the water district of “incompetence,” adding: “If they had done something before, we wouldn’t be facing these draconian restrictions.”

He trucked water in once but is now drilling his own well instead. Dozens of other Montecito residents have also applied to drill wells, which can cost up to $100,000 – and could eventually cause to the subterranean aquifers beneath their feet to run dry.

Mr Nesbitt said: “I’m getting five gallons a minute, eight hours a day out of it at the moment. Not much. Pray for rain, that’s the only solution.”

On the street near Miss Winfrey’s favorite restaurant, Trattoria Mollie, the talk is of little but the drought.

There are rumours of people sending laundry out of town to avoid water fines. Some residents are said to have painted their lawns green.

According to one story a resident’s poodle turned green after rolling in the paint.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the tracks:

NBC News:

TULARE COUNTY, Calif.—The old man knew of the $500-a-day fine for people caught wasting water. He heard the plea for conservation from Governor Jerry Brown. But the water police can’t scare a person whose water isn’t running in the first place.

“Look,” said Carlos Chavez, a retired farm hand in the small town of Seville. He turned the wheel on a big outdoor faucet, the kind of high pressure spigot that’s illegal to operate in California without at least a hose attached to it. Nothing came out except air. It was the same story inside his home, where his plates piled up beneath a kitchen faucet as dry as the shop model.

 As the California drought approaches its fourth year, Seville’s well is one of hundreds of private water holes coughing up sand and spitting air in the Central Valley, according to Tulare County officials. As many as 100,000 more wells are at risk around the state if the rains don’t come by October.