For the hundreds of communities who’ve been saddled with data centers in recent years, the bulky fixtures are sources of unbearable noise, soaring energy prices, and plenty of electrical fires.
Add another grim possibility to that list: debilitating rare cancers.
Reporting on the “data center boom” in the state of Oregon, Rolling Stone tells the story of Jim Doherty, a cattle rancher and former county commissioner of Morrow, in eastern Oregon.
Doherty’s story began when he noticed a rise in bizarre medical conditions among the county’s 45,000 residents, linked to toxins in the local water. Working with the county health office, the rancher-turned-official began a survey of 70 wells throughout his jurisdiction — 68 of which, his testing found, violated the federal limit for nitrates in drinking water.
Of the first 30 homes he visited, Doherty told RS that 25 residents had recently had miscarriages, while six had lost a kidney. “One man about 60 years old had his voice box taken out because of a cancer that only smokers get, but that guy hadn’t smoked a day of his life,” he told the publication.
But the spike in cancer-causing pollution wasn’t just the fault of local farms, as Doherty expected. It had its roots in a 10,000 square foot data center by the commerce giant Amazon, which first went online in Morrow County in 2011.
Basically, the allegations go like this: industrial megafarms operating in the area are responsible for churning out millions of gallons of wastewater, laden with nitrates from fertilizers. All that waste has to go somewhere, which is one way of saying it mostly ends up in the ground.
Amazon’s hulking data center, thirsty for water to cool its blazing hot computer chips, supercharged this process, adding millions of gallons of wastewater a year to the heavy volume of farm runoff, which Morrow County was already struggling to keep up with. Soon even the deepest reaches of the local aquifer were tainted, according to RS, as huge volumes of data center and agricultural wastewater saturated the water table.
This meant that the data center itself began taking on the toxic sludge as it drew on groundwater to cool its electronics. When it did, evaporation only further concentrated the wastewater, which occasionally contained nitrate levels eight times higher than Oregon’s safe limit. The super concentrated data center water then made its way back into the waste system, where it ostensibly piled up all over again.
In response to the allegations, Amazon spokesperson Lisa Levandowski said that “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.”
Morrow County residents, however, beg to differ.
“The historical precedent here is Flint, Michigan,” Kristin Ostrom, executive director of activist group Oregon Rural Action (ORA), told RS. “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.”
“How can you live with yourself knowing that the water you put in people’s houses is causing miscarriages or cancer, or God only knows how it stunts the growth of a kid?” area resident Kathy Mendoza told RS.
Mendoza, along with members ORA, told the outlet she’s suffering an excruciating joint and muscle condition brought about by exposure to nitrates.
“How could they do that? Then these people go out and show their faces in public,” she continued. “And they’re still making money with it, every time those deals get cut for new data centers.”
More on data centers: Meta’s $27 Billion Datacenter Is Wreaking Havoc on a Louisiana Town
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