The Amazon logo is displayed on an Amazon Logistic building in Antwerp
After Amazon built a data center in Morrow County, Oregon, in 2011, one local rancher claims that environmental health issues have been worsening in the area.
Jim Doherty, who has been running a cattle ranch business with his wife for the past 25 years, kept having conversations with neighbors about healthy adults coming down with cancers and other illnesses, according to a report from Rolling Stone.Doherty, who also served as a county commissioner for Morrow County, suspected that the ground water had been contaminated with nitrates.
There is a single aquifer under Morrow County that supplies water for 45,000 residents, largely through private wells.
When he heard about women enduring miscarriages and middle-aged men experiencing organ failure, Doherty decided to take action.
According to Rolling Stone, he decided to take tap water samples from six random homes, and a nearby testing laboratory informed him that all of the samples had excess nitrates relative to federal limits.
He bought 70 more test kits, and 68 violated the federal limits as well, averaging four times that standard.
Doherty took an informal survey of the first 30 homes he sampled.
Among those homes, there were 25 miscarriages, and six people were living with a single kidney, not to mention at least one case of an unusual cancer.
“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,” Doherty told Rolling Stone.
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Data centers, which are used for artificial intelligence computing, are provoking nationwide controversy for their alleged impact on communities where they are built, especially because they tap into often limited water supplies and reportedly cause energy prices to increase.
Rolling Stone reported that, in essence, more water usage from data centers causes nitrogen from chemical fertilizers to enter the groundwater faster.
Amazon denied that the data center had a role in the health crisis.
“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,” Amazon representative Lisa Levandowski asserted.
“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,” she added.
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