Breaking Green Podcast:
Data Centers And Industrial Farming Are Fueling A Groundwater Crisis, with Kaleb Lay

Rural Oregonians are being forced to drink contaminated water while corporations expand unchecked.

In this episode, Kaleb Lay of Oregon Rural Action explains how industrial agriculture and Amazon data centers are driving a nitrate crisis—and how residents are organizing for accountability in a region treated as a sacrifice zone.

We talk with Kaleb Lay from Oregon Rural Action about how people living in a rural Oregon “sacrifice zone” end up with poisoned well water, and a widening wealth gap. We explore environmentalist claims that industrial farming, combined with a rapid build-out of Amazon data centers is compounding deadly nitrate contamination while communities fight for testing, transparency, and accountability.

What is covered:

• what Oregon Rural Action does across immigration justice and pollution work in Northeast Oregon
• why the Lower Umatilla Basin is described as a sacrifice zone
• how industrial scale agriculture drives nitrate groundwater contamination
• what nitrate does in the body, from blue baby syndrome to links with cancers and thyroid dysfunction
• how door to door well testing exposed widespread unsafe drinking water after decades of state inaction
• what retaliation can look like when organizers challenge powerful industries
• what Amazon says about liability and what a $20.5M settlement does and does not change
• why exascale projects raise alarms on water use, electricity demand, and rate impacts
• how transparency gaps and inflated job numbers shape local decision making
• why PFAS testing and disclosure matter for data center waste streams

Excerpts from the show:

“In 2022, we we tested almost 700 wells with a very small team of volunteers, and what we found was was horrifying. Extraordinarily high levels of contamination, you know, up to five, six times the limit that’s considered safe under federal law right now, and very, very widespread. Entire communities were affected. In a neighborhood of 100 wells, maybe two or three were were below the unsafe limit… …There’s honestly a bit of trauma involved in all this. Knocking on a door and walking someone through what nitrate can do as you do a rapid test in their house and showing them, hey, your nitrate level looks like it’s above 30. Here are the health consequences of that, and watching the blood drain from their face as they make the connections to the cancer that their loved ones have had or that they have, or the miscarriages that they couldn’t explain over the years that prevented them from starting a family. It’s incredibly difficult work. The only solace I can take from that is it’s motivating. And we have seen a real upswell of industry or community members who want to stand up to polluting industry and and make meaningful change.

Each [data center] uses massive amounts of water, energy and diesel as backup power. Now, the water is the key piece of this. If those data centers pull in contaminated water and cycle it through their data center as a way of cooling those servers, as all of these data centers do, then they lose a lot of that water to evaporation. The water coming out on the other side is a much higher concentration. There’s data I can point to showing that some of these campuses pull in water, and when it leaves, it’s eight times more contaminated than when it came in.

Kaleb Lay

Kaleb Lay is a fifth-generation eastern Oregonian and former journalist who now serves as Director of Policy & Research with Oregon Rural Action, a nonprofit organization that works with frontline communities in rural northeast Oregon. He is a leading expert in pollution issues in Oregon’s Lower Umatilla Basin, which is both one of the most polluted places in the Pacific Northwest and one of the fastest-growing data center hubs in the United States. He’s also an avid outdoorsman, and gardener