Pacific Northwest
Crook and Morrow Counties
Meta and Apple campuses cost Crook County schools more than 16 million dollars in 2024. Amazon's Boardman campuses drove nitrate contamination to eight times the federal limit in 45,000 wells; a class action settled for 20.5 million dollars in March 2026.
Crook County, on the high desert east of the Cascades, and Morrow County, on the Columbia Plateau, are Oregon’s two oldest hyperscale data-center jurisdictions. Meta broke ground in Prineville in 2010, Apple followed in 2014, and Amazon built 13 facilities on former circle-pivot potato and onion ground in Boardman beginning in 2011. The two counties offered cheap power from the Bonneville Power Administration’s hydroelectric system, dry air that reduces evaporative cooling demand, and enterprise-zone and Strategic Investment Program tax waivers that suspend property taxation for 15 years on large industrial investments.
The Crooked River aquifer that supplies both domestic wells and the Prineville campus cooling systems already registered stress before Meta arrived. Biologists identified a pattern by the mid-2010s in which Meta and Apple’s combined water draws reduced baseflow to the Crooked River springs that support redband trout. The Oregon Department of Revenue data released in 2025 showed that the Crook County school district lost more than 16 million dollars in 2024 alone from enterprise-zone abatements on Meta, Apple, and associated facilities, up from 111,500 dollars in 2019.
In Morrow County, the mechanism was different. Amazon’s cooling towers concentrate nitrates already present in Port of Morrow wastewater, which the port sprays back onto fields that recharge the Lower Umatilla Basin aquifer. A class of 45,000 residents reliant on private wells, disproportionately Mexican-American farmworker families whose community dates to the 1940s Bracero Program, documented nitrate concentrations reaching eight times the federal legal limit. Oregon Rural Action and Columbia Riverkeeper organized the litigation. Amazon reached a 20.5 million dollar settlement in March 2026.
The essays under these counties document the Prineville school-tax drain and aquifer drawdown, the Boardman nitrate contamination and settlement, and the organizing by Oregon Rural Action, WaterWatch of Oregon, Columbia Riverkeeper, and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.