“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…