I n the spring of 2022, Jim Doherty kept having the same conversation with folks at the only grocery store in Boardman, his eastern Oregon hometown, or at the grain depot where he picked up food for his four ranch dogs. Healthy adults that these people knew were coming down with unexplained medical conditions, including diseases and cancers that usually afflicted the elderly. “It was kinda grim,” Doherty says.
Sixty years old, broad-chested, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, Doherty had been running a cattle ranch business with his wife for 25 years when he entered public service in 2016, winning a seat on Morrow County’s three-person board of commissioners.
What stood out about those conversations was the way people connected them to a problem with water in the area. Doherty knew what they meant: The county’s underground water supply had been tainted with nitrates — a byproduct of chemical fertilizers used by the megafarms and food processing plants where most of his constituents worked.
The aquifer underneath Morrow County, known as the Lower Umatilla Basin, is the only source of water for as many as 45,000 residents in and around the county, the majority of whom rely on private wells that draw on the basin. Since 1991, regulators at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) have been collecting samples from the aquifer that show a slow and steady increase of chemical toxins in the water.
Water hadn’t really been a political priority for Doherty — he’s a Republican, and he focused mostly on economic development and transportation projects — until a couple of years into his second term, when the uptick of stories he heard about young women enduring miscarriages and middle-aged men with organ failure started making him uneasy. Scientists believe that excess consumption of even a small amount of nitrates can do significant harm to the human body; they can cause debilitating conditions in newborns and have been linked to increased risks of cancer. Doherty wasn’t familiar with the research at the time, but he wondered if there was a connection between the contamination in the water and those conversations he kept having.
In June 2022, he decided to do something about it. He went out and collected tap water samples from six homes he chose at random and sent them to a nearby laboratory. The lab called a few days later and explained that it was their policy to notify anyone with a sample that tested above the federal limit for the presence of nitrates in drinking water — 10 parts per million.
Doherty asked which family was going to receive the bad news about their water. But the lab tech corrected him. It wasn’t one of the homes he visited that had a toxic well. It was all six. Doherty says he picked up 70 more test kits and went back out a week later, this time knocking on doors across a wider swath of the county. The results were equally bleak. Of the 70 wells he tested, 68 violated the safety threshold, with an average concentration of nitrates close to four times the federal limit.
When Doherty collected the water samples, accompanied by an official with the county health office, they’d taken an informal survey. Talking mostly to farmhands and factory workers who were reliant on well water, they asked if anyone in their household had one or more of the known medical conditions linked to nitrate exposure. According to Doherty, within the first 30 homes they visited, they heard of at least 25 miscarriages and a half dozen people living with one kidney. “One man about 60 years old had his voice box taken out because of a cancer that only smokers get,” Doherty says, “but that guy hadn’t smoked a day of his life.”
It never occurred to Doherty that his effort to fix the water problem would provoke the ire of a group of local officials who resented scrutiny of their role in the pollution. That it would end his political career, tank his cattle sales, and cause him so much stress he’d lose 50 pounds. He couldn’t have foreseen the multibillion-dollar political scandal submerged in that fouled water, the class action lawsuit that would rise from it, the intervention by the Oregon governor and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a civil suit from the Oregon attorney general, or sanctions from the state’s ethics commission and Department of Environmental Quality. He never thought parents in the area would be terrified that their children might sneak a glass of poisonous water from the kitchen sink. And he never imagined that one of the world’s largest tech companies — Amazon — could play a part in the crisis.
“The historical precedent here is Flint, Michigan,” says Kristin Ostrom, executive director of Oregon Rural Action (ORA), a water rights advocacy group. “In part because of how slow the response to the crisis has been, and in part because of who’s affected. These are people who have no political or economic power, and very little knowledge of the risk.”
AMAZON OPENED MORROW COUNTY’S first “hyperscale” data center in 2011 — nearly 10,000 square feet of warehouse space filled with rows of computer servers. The facility services the company’s most profitable division, its cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon’s presence lent Big Tech cachet to the county’s industrial district and diversified its investment portfolio away from a reliance on agriculture. Amazon has generated commercial taxes for the county worth more than $100 million over the course of a decade.
Eager to compete with other rural communities looking to host data center campuses, local officials had offered Amazon a 15-year tax abatement for each hyperscale data center it built, which would be worth billions to the company. Amazon has since constructed seven such facilities in the area, with agreements for five more underway.
There was good reason for Amazon to set itself up in a place like Morrow County. With $107 billion in cloud computing sales in 2024, Amazon Web Services has the dominant position with 30 percent of the market. But the company faces stiff competition from Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, and Google. In the third quarter of 2024, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft increased their investment in data centers 81 percent compared to the previous year, per the telecom market researcher Dell’Oro Group, and have already spent $360 billion on capital expenditures over the last 12 months. S&P predicts that demand for new construction is expected to double by 2030, most of it in rural counties like Morrow that are otherwise reliant on agriculture. Around the country, and the world, there is a land race among the big tech companies for sites for their data centers. The stakes of the game are high: A recent Goldman Sachs analysis found AI technology could unlock as much as $5 to $19 trillion for the American economy.
But data centers pose a variety of climate and environmental problems, including their impact on the water supply. The volume of water needed to cool the servers in data centers — most of which need to be kept at 70 to 80 degrees to run effectively — has become a nationwide water resource issue particularly in areas facing water scarcity across the West. This year, a Bloomberg News analysis found that roughly “two-thirds of new data centers built or in development since 2022 are in places already gripped by high levels of water stress.” Droughts have plagued Morrow County, occurring annually since 2020. But even areas with ample water reserves are vulnerable to the outsized demand from data centers. Earlier this year, the International Energy Agency reported that data centers could consume 1,200 billion liters by 2030 worldwide, nearly double the 560 billion liters of water they use currently.
The volume of water isn’t the most pressing problem in Morrow County, however. The issue is pollution, which Amazon’s data centers have exacerbated since their arrival.
In response to a request for comment, Amazon spokesperson Lisa Levandowski replied that “the apparent narrative” of this story “is misleading and inaccurate.” Levandowski went on to say: “The truth is that this region has long-documented groundwater quality challenges that significantly predate AWS’ presence, and federal, state, and local agencies have spent years working to address nitrates from agricultural fertilizer, manure, septic systems, and wastewater from food processing plants. Our data centers draw water from the same supply as other community members; nitrates are not an additive we use in any of our processes, and the volume of water our facilities use and return represents only a very small fraction of the overall water system — not enough to have any meaningful impact on water quality.”
“One man about 60 years old had his voice box taken out because of a cancer only smokers get, but that guy hadn’t smoked a day of his life.”
Jim Doherty, former Morrow County commissioner
Morrow is an unlikely location for an agricultural juggernaut. Essentially desert country, its porous, sandy soil is inhospitable to all but a few types of shallow-root crops. Yet over the last few decades, it was transformed by a group of entrepreneurial local officials and farm operators who leveraged chemical fertilizers to make the desert bloom.
To compensate for the dry conditions and create more capacity for large agricultural operations, vast irrigation systems were built in the 1990s by officials at the Port of Morrow, the county’s transportation and food-processing hub along the bank of the Columbia River. Increased water flow meant large agricultural companies could use fertilizers in fields year-round. That drew some of the Pacific Northwest’s largest dairy concerns and producers of onions and potatoes to Morrow County. Lamb Weston, which supplies virtually all of the potatoes for McDonald’s french fries, set up shop. So did Threemile Canyon Farms, one of the largest dairy operators in the nation.
The massive inputs of fertilizer to grow crops and feed for the animals came at a price: the contamination of the Lower Umatilla Basin. In 1992, DEQ measured an average nitrate concentration of 9.2 ppm across a cluster of wells pulling from the basin. By 2015, that average had risen 46 percent, to 15.3 ppm. For some wells, DEQ found nitrate levels nearly as high as 73 ppm, more than 10 times the state limit of 7 ppm.
Every day, the megafarms and food processing plants in Morrow County send millions of gallons of wastewater to the Port of Morrow. The Port in turn pumps it to one of several lagoons that hold tens or hundreds of millions of gallons of tainted water. Vast pools of this wastewater are covered in football field-sized tarps, which trap the solids that rise to the surface. Microbes metabolize some of the solids, expelling methane gas which then burns out of thin chimney pipes sticking up from the tarps, the flames flickering atop like birthday candles. Once the solid waste has burned off, the water under the tarp is laden with residual nitrogen chemicals — the remains of the fertilizers, animal manure, and plant material. At no cost to farm operators, the Port then pumps that nitrogen-dense water back out onto the farms, where nitrogen turns into nitrates when it interacts with the soil. It is a novel recycling process that alleviates the Port’s wastewater burden and offers farms a steady flow of highly concentrated fertilized water to expand their industrial-ag footprints.
When the Port sprays that water back over the farms, some of the nitrates are absorbed by the crops, but there’s a limit to how much the sandy soil and shallow-root plants can hold before it leaks all the way through the dirt, polluting the aquifer below. “The aquifer is basically one giant sandbox, and the water flows through there very quickly,” says Chad Gubala, a hydrologist who managed Oregon DEQ’s oversight of the Port of Morrow’s wastewater permit from 2018 to 2022. Once the crops have absorbed what they can, the rest of the nitrates “get flushed right through [to the basin].”
Experts say Amazon’s arrival supercharged this process. The data centers suck up tens of millions of gallons of water from the aquifer each year to cool their computer equipment, which then gets funneled to the Port’s wastewater system. All of the data center water gets mixed into the dirty lagoon wastewater, which only increases how much water the Port must then discard over the fields. As Greg Pettit, who served at the DEQ for 38 years and led the development of Oregon’s Groundwater Quality, explains, “the more water you put on, the faster you’re going to drive the nitrogen through the soil and down into the aquifer.”
As this precarious balance continues to tip, the lessons from Flint serve as a stark reminder of the consequences that can follow unchecked industrial growth and inadequate water management. The situation in Oregon underscores the urgent need for comprehensive policies and practices that prioritize sustainable water use and safeguard essential aquifer resources. Without such measures, the rich agricultural landscape may pay a heavy toll, endangering both public health and the environment for generations to come.
