'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters unite against data centres

Re:'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters uni... by autoexec on Friday September 04, 2026 @01:39PM (#49567740)

In the case of one amazon data center the town already had nitrates in their water due to agricultural runoff, but at levels that weren't a problem. Amazon took in hundreds of millions of gallons of that water for cooling, which evaporated away some of the water, but left the nitrates. Then amazon dumped the concentrated nitrate 'waste water' at such high volumes that it was pushed so deep into ground that it reached the aquifer contaminating the source for some 45k people. Soon people's taps were delivering water contaminated at 10x the legal limit. People got sick. A bunch of parents lost their babies.

Amazon was forced to settle for 20 million which will pay for digging to find uncontaminated water sources deeper in the ground. They'll also pay for water treatments to help remove the excess nitrates.

Data centers don't have to bring in new toxins and pollutants. They can also make existing problems much much worse.

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Re:'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters uni... by sidewndr46 on Friday September 04, 2026 @02:18PM (#49568207)

This doesn't even make any sense. "deeper in the ground" is mostly wishful thinking. Why wouldn't the contamination spread? How can anyone be sure there is even potable water deeper?

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Re:'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters uni... by autoexec on Friday September 04, 2026 @03:06PM (#49568830)

With regular rainfall/usage the nitrates don't get far enough down to reach the aquifer. The nitrates get filtered naturally and remain in upper layers of the soil. Amazon concentrated the contamination and drove it far enough down that it reached and contaminated the aquifer, but below that the father down you dig and pull up water the less contaminated it will be. Part of the settlement is a fund for digging new private wells deep enough that the water contamination is under legal limits. I guess if there's no clean water below the contamination they'll have to stop using wells entirely and depend on treated water from the contaminated source.

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