What happened

According to reporting by Rolling Stone and Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN), residents of Morrow County, Eastern Oregon, are suffering steep rises in miscarriages, kidney failures, and rare cancers, including cancers in people who had never smoked or had no typical risk factors, alongside other serious health problems. 

The problem worsened after several Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres began operating in the area in 2022, with groundwater from the local aquifer - the sole source for around 45,000 residents - showing dramatic increases in nitrate levels, with some wells testing as high as 73 parts per million (ppm), far above Oregon’s safe limit of 7 ppm and the US federal safety limit of 10 ppm. 

The AWS facilities use significant amounts of groundwater, which is already contaminated with fertiliser runoff from industrial agriculture. The process of using this water to cool ultra-hot servers causes a partial evaporation, leaving behind a more concentrated wastewater residue containing significantly higher levels of nitrates.

The hyper-contaminated wastewater is reportedly being dumped or sprayed onto nearby farmland, where it infiltrates the aquifer, increasing the nitrate concentration in the public's drinking water.

Why it happened

Data centres require enormous amounts of water for cooling. In this case, drawing from a stressed aquifer and then discharging used water appears to have “supercharged” pre-existing nitrate pollution from agriculture.

The local soil in Oregon is sandy and porous, allowing nitrates to seep easily back into groundwater after wastewater is spread over farmland. This environmental vulnerability was apparently not sufficiently considered when approving or managing data-centre waste discharge.

Critics argue there is inadequate legal and regulatory oversight, and systemtically poor transparency by Amazon: the data-centre operations were treated as a small fraction of overall water usage, but the cumulative effect over time has had serious consequences.

In addition, reports indicate that the local government and regulatory bodies aggressively pursued and facilitated Amazon's growth, prioritising the economic benefits (tax revenue, jobs, personalfinancial gain) above stringent public health and ethical oversight. 

The unchecked expansion allowed AWS to use vast amounts of water and discharge concentrated wastewater without sufficient environmental review or accountability, leading to a public health crisis.

AWS argues that the groundwater contamination issue is a long-standing problem caused primarily by industrial agriculture, food processing wastewater, manure, and septic systems, all of which significantly predate the company's data center operations in Morrow County.