Amazon Data Center Linked to Cluster of Rare Cancers

For hundreds of communities that have been burdened with data centers in recent years, the massive installations are sources of unbearable noise, high energy prices, and lots of electrical fires.

Add another grim prospect to that list: debilitating rare cancers.

Reporting on the ‘data center boom’ in Oregon, Rolling Stone It tells the story of Jim Doherty, a rancher and former Morrow County commissioner, in eastern Oregon.

Doherty’s story began when he noticed a rise in strange medical conditions among the county’s 45,000 residents, linked to toxins in local waters. Working with the county health office, the farmer-turned-official began a survey of 70 wells across his jurisdiction — 68 of which, his testing found, violated the federal limit for nitrates in drinking water.

Doherty said it was among the first 30 homes he visited rupee 25 residents had recently suffered a miscarriage, while six lost their kidneys. He told the publication: “A man, about 60 years old, had his larynx removed due to a cancer that only smokers get, but this man had never smoked a single day in his life.”

But the spike in cancer-causing pollution wasn’t just the fault of local farms, as Doherty predicted. Its roots go back to a 10,000-square-foot data center by commerce giant Amazon, which first came online in Morrow County in 2011.

Basically, the allegations go like this: Major industrial farms operating in the area are responsible for producing millions of gallons of nitrate-laden wastewater from fertilizers. All this waste has to go somewhere, which is one way of saying that it mostly ends up in the ground.

Amazon’s massive data center, starved of water to cool hot computer chips, fueled the process, adding millions of gallons of wastewater annually to the large volume of farm runoff that Morrow County was already struggling to keep up with. The deepest local aquifers were quickly contaminated, he said rupeeHuge amounts of data center and agricultural drainage water have saturated the groundwater level.

This means that the data center itself began processing toxic sludge while drawing groundwater to cool its electronic equipment. When this happened, evaporation increased the concentration of wastewater, which sometimes contained nitrate levels eight times higher than Oregon’s safe limit. The ultra-concentrated data center water then returned to the waste system, where it apparently accumulated again.

In response to the allegations, Amazon spokeswoman Lisa Lewandowski said, “Our data centers draw water from the same source as other community members; nitrate is not an additive we use in any of our operations, and the volume of water our facilities use and return represents only a very small portion of the overall water system — and is not enough to make any measurable impact on water quality.”

But Morrow County residents disagree.

“The historical precedent here is Flint, Michigan,” said Christine Ostrom, executive director of the activist group Oregon Rural Action (ORA). rupee. “This is partly because of how slow the response to the crisis has been, and partly because of those affected. These are people who have no political or economic power, and very little knowledge of the risks.”

“How can you live with yourself when you know that the water you put in people’s homes causes miscarriage or cancer, or God only knows how it hinders the development of the child?” Area resident Cathy Mendoza He said rupee.

Along with ORA members, Mendoza said she suffers from a painful joint and muscle condition caused by exposure to nitrates.

She continued: “How can they do that? Then these people go out and show their faces in public.” “And they still make money doing it, every time these deals are discounted for new data centers.”

More about data centers: A $27 billion Meta data center is wreaking havoc in a Louisiana city