“The Precedent Is Flint”: Rolling Stone Links Amazon Data Centers to Poisoned Oregon Wells. Hillsboro Should Pay Attention.

By Dirk Knudsen – Editor, Hillsboro Herald

A new investigation fromRolling Stone, produced with the Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN)
, reads like a climate-era ghost story with a very real body count. The story, titled “The Precedent Is Flint: How Oregon’s Data Center Boom Is Supercharging a Water Crisis”,  focuses on Morrow County in Eastern Oregon, where Amazon has quietly built a cluster of massive data centers on top of an aquifer that was already polluted by decades of industrial agriculture.

Reporters document how nitrate-contaminated well water — linked by health experts to rare cancers, miscarriages, and kidney damage — is being used to cool Amazon’s servers, then returned even more concentrated and sprayed onto surrounding farmland, where it seeps right back into the groundwater tens of thousands of people drink.

Residents and advocates are blunt: they’re calling it “Oregon’s Flint.”

What’s happening in Morrow County

The aquifer under northern Morrow and Umatilla counties is part of the Lower Umatilla Basin Groundwater Management Area, which Oregon’s DEQ first declared a problem back in 1990 due to rising nitrate contamination.  Federal and state scientists have been warning for years that nitrate levels in many private wells routinely exceed the legal limit of 10 parts per million (ppm), with some wells now testing over 70 ppm. 
Recent DEQ trend analysis shows the maximum concentration has climbed to around 75 ppm in some locations,
a number echoed in DEQ’s own nitrate trend reports.

Into that existing crisis came Amazon. According to Rolling Stone and follow-up coverage summarizing the investigation, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has built at least seven huge data centers in the area since 2011, with more planned. These facilities collectively pull tens of millions of gallons of groundwater a year to cool their equipment. Here’s the key dynamic described by the investigation and further explained in outlets like Heated and other summaries:

• Water drawn from the aquifer is already contaminated with nitrates from fertilizer, manure, and food-processing wastewater.
• When that water runs through the data centers and heats up, some of it evaporates off ultra-hot servers.
  The nitrates don’t evaporate — they stay behind, concentrating the pollution.
• The resulting wastewater, sometimes testing between 56 and 73 ppm nitrates, is then sent to the  Port of Morrow’s land-application system , which sprays it onto nearby farm fields.
• With sandy, porous soils and decades of over-application already on the books, more nitrates simply
  leach back into the same aquifer local families rely on.

Doctors and residents now point to clusters of rare cancers, kidney failure, and miscarriages among families
on contaminated wells, a pattern highlighted not only in the Rolling Stone/FERN collaboration
but in independent coverage from outlets like Futurism and The Verge.

Amazon disputes the blame. The company argues that its data centers don’t add nitrates, use only a small
fraction of the region’s water, and that groundwater problems predate AWS. A summary on the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre includes Amazon’s statement in full.

Critics respond that Amazon knowingly sited water-hungry facilities in a known contamination zone, took generous tax breaks, and then made a bad problem worse while local families still haul bottled water to survive.

Editor’s Note:  Data Centers are discussed in terms of their size and

Meanwhile, Hillsboro is building its own data-center empire

If Morrow County is the warning flare, Hillsboro is the powder magazine.

National market trackers such as CBRE list the Portland/Hillsboro region as one of the largest data-center markets in North America.  A recent CBRE market profile notes that Hillsboro’s data-center industry continues to grow rapidly, with new developments, expansions, and hundreds of megawatts of additional capacity planned for the next few years (CBRE H1 2023 profile and  H1 2025 update).

The Daily Journal of Commerce recently reported that Hillsboro alone has about 475 megawatts of data-center inventory, making it the seventh-largest market in the country (DJC, Sept. 12, 2025). Portland General Electric, meanwhile, has publicly discussed plans to interconnect roughly 400 megawatts of new data-center load in Hillsboro by 2029, as described in recent coverage from Canary Media and related utility filings.

The Herald believes the 465 Megawatt figure is very low; the actual number is approaching 700 MW, with future planned projects taking us to 1 Gigawatt, which will make Hillsboro the #1 most impacted City in the Nation!  Here is a fact-based graphic assuming that Hillsboro has 540 MW of Data Centers operating now.  This makes us #7 in the Nation for all US Cities in terms of megawatts -BUT when we divide the population of each of the top cities and compare it to the Population, we see Hillsboro residents are by far he most impacted people in America.

On top of that, Oregon and Hillsboro have leaned heavily on the Enterprise Zone property-tax abatement program.  As the Herald has documented in detail (“Oregon’s Enterprise Zone Waives Millions in Costs to Hillsboro Data Centers”  and “The Hillsboro Oregon Data Center Free Ride”), data-center operators here can receive 100% property-tax exemptions for three to five years on new improvements.

A statewide analysis from Good Jobs First, summarized in another Herald story, finds that Oregon’s Enterprise Zone and Strategic Investment Program deals have cost schools more than $1.2 billion in revenue in recent years (Herald coverage and Good Jobs First report).

In other words, we are choosing to become a West Coast data center powerhouse — without a full accounting of the long-term costs.

Different county, same playbook

Hillsboro is not Morrow County. Our water system, sources, and soils are different. Our data centers lean more on large utility supplies and less on isolated rural wells. But the pattern Rolling Stone documented in Eastern Oregon should feel familiar:

• Rural and small-town communities are promised jobs and “innovation” if they welcome power-hungry data centers.
• Tax waivers and incentives are pushed through quietly, often with minimal public debate,
  as described in state and local reporting on data-center subsidies (Governing, Oregon Center for Public Policy).
• Oversight of water, wastewater, and air emissions lags far behind construction schedules,
  as the ongoing nitrate-reduction efforts in the Lower Umatilla Basin make painfully clear
  (Oregon Nitrate Reduction Plan and quarterly reports to EPA ).
• When the bill comes due — in the form of polluted water, health crises, overloaded power grids, or
  Lithium-battery fire risks — it’s residents and local services who pay, not the multitrillion-dollar companies
  leasing the racks.

Now, Oregon’s own environmental agencies are still scrambling to tighten nitrate monitoring rules in the Lower Umatilla Basin, decades after the problem was first flagged. The lesson for Hillsboro is simple: we cannot afford to be “surprised” later.

What Hillsboro should be asking right now

If an aquifer can be pushed into crisis in farm country along the Columbia, it raises urgent questions here at home, where we’re piling up data centers next to neighborhoods, schools, and creeks:

• Exactly how much water will each Hillsboro data center use at full build-out — and from which sources?
• How will their wastewater be handled? What goes into the sewer, what gets re-used, and what ends up in our historic Waibel and McKay Creek on the way to the Tualatin River or into the ground?
• Are diesel generators, battery rooms, and cooling systems being monitored in real time for emissions and safety —and who gets to see that data?
• What independent health and environmental reviews are required before more megawatts and buildings are approved?
• Finally, if the public is giving away years of property-tax revenue, what are we getting back besides “jobs” and blank walls?

Right now, the national story is Morrow County. But the next chapter could easily be written in Hillsboro if we keep sprinting toward more megawatts without guardrails.

The Herald is digging in

The Hillsboro Herald will be:

• Breaking down the Rolling Stone / FERN investigation in plain language;
• Mapping Hillsboro’s existing and planned data centers by power, water use, and proximity to homes and creeks;
• Following the money on tax breaks, power deals, and infrastructure upgrades that make this boom possible.

If you work in water, health care, Intel, data centers, PGE, or local government and have information about how this build-out is affecting our community, you can reach the Herald confidentially.

hillsboroherald@gmail.com and or 503-799-8383- as for Dirk.

This is not just a story about servers.
It’s a story about who gets clean water, clean air, and a future — and who doesn’t.