‘The Precedent Is Flint’: How Oregon’s Data Center Boom Is Supercharging a Water Crisis Highlight

Every day, the megafarms and food processing plants in Morrow County send millions of gallons of wastewater to the Port of Morrow. The Port in turn pumps it to one of several lagoons that hold tens or hundreds of millions of gallons of tainted water. Vast pools of this wastewater are covered in football field-sized tarps, which trap the solids that rise to the surface. Microbes metabolize some of the solids, expelling methane gas which then burns out of thin chimney pipes sticking up from the tarps, the flames flickering atop like birthday candles. Once the solid waste has burned off, the water under the tarp is laden with residual nitrogen chemicals — the remains of the fertilizers, animal manure, and plant material. At no cost to farm operators, the Port then pumps that nitrogen-dense water back out onto the farms, where nitrogen turns into nitrates when it interacts with the soil. It is a novel recycling process that alleviates the Port’s wastewater burden and offers farms a steady flow of highly concentrated fertilized water to expand their industrial-ag footprints.