In one of America’s richest towns residents are paying more than ten times the going rate for water in a desperate attempt to stave off California’s “epochal” drought.
Nestled under the Santa Ynez mountains and cooled by the Pacific Ocean breeze, the billionaires’ bolt hole of Montecito, California, seems at first glance like a palm tree-strewn idyll.
Here, in one of America’s wealthiest post codes, celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, George Lucas, Rob Lowe, Kevin Costner and Ellen DeGeneres live alongside CEOs too numerous to mention in some of the world’s biggest and most outlandish homes.
But look a little closer and it is soon apparent there is trouble in this paradise: not even the likes of Miss Winfrey, it seems, can make it rain.
As California endures what the state’s governor Jerry Brown has called a drought of “epochal” proportions, lawns everywhere – including one at a five-acre property owned by the chat show queen – are scorched and gone to seed.
A polo field also lies unwatered and, according to locals, some owners of $10 million (£6.2 million) homes are eating off paper plates to avoid using their dishwashers.
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