Of the first 30 homes he visited, Doherty told RS that 25 residents had recently had miscarriages, while six had lost a kidney. It had its roots in a 10,000 square foot data center by the commerce giant Amazon, which first went online in Morrow County in 2011. This meant that the data center itself began taking on the toxic sludge as it drew on groundwater to cool its electronics. The super concentrated data center water then made its way back into the waste system, where it ostensibly piled up all over again. “The historical precedent here is Flint, Michigan,” Kristin Ostrom, executive director of activist group Oregon Rural Action (ORA), told RS.