The Verge – Morrow County, Oregon, is home to mega farms and food processing plants. But it’s also home to several Amazon data centers.
And now, some experts believe, that combination is leading to an alarmingly high concentration of nitrates in the drinking water that is driving up cancer and miscarriage rates in the area.
Rolling Stone’s exposé details how Amazon, despite not using any dangerous nitrates to cool its data centers, is accelerating the contamination of the Lower Umatilla Basin aquifer, which residents rely on for drinking water.
It’s a combination of poor wastewater management, sandy soil, and good old physics that has led to nitrate concentrations in drinking water as high as 73 ppm (parts per million) in some wells, which is 10 times the state limit of 7 ppm and seven times the federal limit.
According to Rolling Stone, “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.”
The result is that more nitrate-laden wastewater gets pumped onto area farms. But the porous soil saturates quickly and more nitrates make their way into the aquifer.
This is exacerbated when Amazon then pulls this contaminated water, which is already over federal legal limits for nitrates, up to cool its data centers:
When that tainted water moves through the data centers to absorb heat from the server systems, some of the water is evaporated, but the nitrates remain, increasing the concentration.
That means that when the polluted water has moved through the data centers and back into the wastewater system, it’s even more contaminated, sometimes averaging as high as 56 ppm, eight times Oregon’s safety limit.
Amazon, of course, disputes this narrative …
