KATHRYN B. BROWN
Owner
ANDREW CUTLER
Publisher/Editor
ERICK PETERSON
Hermiston Editor/Senior Reporter
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2021
A4
Founded October 16, 1875
OUR VIEW
Reusing
big data’s
water
can help
farmers
B
ig tech has been putting large data
farms in rural areas in the Pacifi c
Northwest for years to take advantage
of cheap hydroelectric power to run them,
water to cool them, and generous local tax
breaks to help fund them.
Data centers are large warehouses fi lled
with computer servers. All the information
gathered by websites such as Amazon and
Facebook is stored in the server farms.
All of this has been controversial locally
and throughout the region. For farmers and
ranchers, the sticking point is water. In the
arid, rural landscape that these facilities call
home, water comes at a premium. Computer
servers generate a lot of heat and tech fi rms
need a lot of water to cool them.
A single data center consumes between
250,000 and 1 million gallons of water per
day in the warmer summer months, when
outside temperatures can top 100 degrees.
The Apple facility in Prineville, for example,
uses more than 27 million gallons of water
a year.
To their credit, local leaders and the tech
giants are working to temper the impact of
extracting so much of a scarce resource.
In Prineville, Apple is using 5 million
gallons of treated wastewater from the city’s
sewer system to help cool its facility, leav-
ing 5 million gallons of fresh water for other
purposes.
In Umatilla, city leaders were faced with
another problem. The water used to cool two
data campuses in the small city fl ows into
the sewer treatment system. With two more
facilities under construction, the city faced
the prospect of its sewer system being over-
whelmed.
City Manager Dave Stockdale says the
water that comes out of the data centers
is hot, but mostly clean. Both the city and
Amazon began pondering ways they could
reuse the water, adding benefit for the
community.
Amazon now pipes some of that water to
an irrigation canal run by the West Exten-
sion Irrigation District. The water takes a
seven-mile route to a new headworks on the
district’s canal at the northeast end of the
city. Along the way it’s mixed with fresh
water from the Columbia River, making the
mixture suitable for irrigating crops on the
10,400 acres served by the district.
During this summer’s drought, this
creative reuse made millions of gallons of
water available to farmers in the region.
Amazon says it wants to fi nd other ways
to reuse the water that cools its facilities, and
eventually wants a reutilization rate of 100%.
There are any number of reasons to be
suspicious of the tech giants. Like many
others, we question whether local juris-
dictions reap the big rewards promised by
companies that have located in their commu-
nities.
But, once in place these server farms are
a fact of life and won’t be going anywhere
soon. It only makes sense the water they
consume, and have been given right to, is
reused to the extent possible.
We congratulate the companies and
communities that have given farmers the
benefi t from water that would literally have
gone down the drain, and encourage all
eff orts to reutilize this ever more precious
resource.
Keeping elk on public land
BILL
ANEY
THIS LAND IS OUR LAND
W
here are all the elk?
It’s a common question
heard every fall around camp-
fi res and wood cook stoves in the Blue
Mountains. Hunters share any number of
theories about why they can’t fi nd elk: too
many predators, too many hunters, too
many motor vehicles, not enough (or too
much) logging, too much cattle grazing,
bad herd management — the list is long
and imaginative.
The Blue Mountains have the poten-
tial for some of the world’s best quality
habitat for Rocky Mountain elk. There
are about 55,000 elk in the Blue Moun-
tains, and in most areas the herds are near
the states’ management objectives. So
why do some hunters have a hard time
fi nding elk? As is often the case, it’s not
about numbers, it’s about distribution.
Elk like to be where they can fi nd good
habitat without being disturbed. Tradi-
tionally elk would spend the spring,
summer and fall in the Blue Mountains
where they found cooler temperatures
and shade, plentiful water and lush
forage. With the arrival of winter snow,
they migrated to lower elevations, only to
repeat the cycle in the spring and follow
the green-up into the hills.
But some elk in the Blues have
changed their habits to avoid public
land, spending more time on lower
elevation private lands where hunters
and motorized vehicles don’t disturb
EDITORIALS
Unsigned editorials are the opinion
of the East Oregonian editorial board.
Other columns, letters and cartoons
on this page express the opinions of
the authors and not necessarily that
of the East Oregonian.
LETTERS
The East Oregonian welcomes
them. By the time elk rifl e season rolls
around, the elk have been pushed around
for several months by bow hunters and
deer hunters, and in increasing numbers
they have moved off public lands to get
the security they crave, well before the
winter snow.
Private landowners greet this devel-
opment in a variety of ways. Some are
pleased just to see elk on their land. Some
want elk so their family and friends can
hunt, and some are fi nding ways to mone-
tize this public resource by charging for
hunting and/or access on their property.
And some landowners want no elk on
their land because elk eat the same feed
as domestic livestock and have a habit of
destroying fences.
I maintain that we need a way to hold
more elk on public lands through the fall.
This is good for public land hunters, obvi-
ously, but it also would reduce confl icts
with agricultural interests. I also confess
that I don’t like the idea of private land-
owners selling the rights to hunt native
wildlife when those animals should be
on public lands.
How do we keep them there? The
science is known — and it’s local. Proj-
ects completed on the La Grande Ranger
District have demonstrated how manag-
ing vegetation and reducing disturbance
from motor vehicles can turn around this
problematic migration pattern. Forest
thinning and prescribed burning creates
quality feeding areas that are especially
attractive to elk in the late summer and
fall when they are trying to put on the
calories for winter.
But quality feed is useless to elk if they
are constantly disturbed by motor vehi-
cles. With more than 4,500 miles of roads
on the Umatilla National Forest, elk often
abandon areas used by cars, pickups,
all-terrain vehicles, motorcycles and the
like. Fortunately, the Umatilla National
Forest has a travel management plan that
identifi es only a subset of these roads as
open to motor vehicles, with the remain-
der closed for all or part of the year.
This is a good thing for elk as it
improves habitat security and can ulti-
mately increase public land elk hunting
opportunities when elk relearn to stay on
public lands later in the fall.
However, this requires that we all
know what roads are open to traffi c and
which are closed, and follow the plan.
A new cooperative venture between the
U.S. Forest Service, Oregon Department
of Fish and Wildlife and Oregon State
University extension service should
help. The eff ort will be highlighted in the
2022 big game hunting season synopsis,
as well as on signboards at national forest
entry points and in printed brochures and
downloadable digital maps.
In the meantime, elk hunters need to
learn which roads are closed to motor
vehicles in their hunting area and commit
to driving only on open roads. The
Forest Service Motor Vehicle Use Maps
are available for free download on their
website and paper copies in the forest
offi ces.
We also need to be supportive of forest
thinning and prescribed burning projects,
recognizing that the high quality habi-
tat that results will attract and hold more
elk and improve the odds for public land
hunters.
———
Bill Aney is a forester and wildlife biol-
ogist living in Pendleton and loving the
Blue Mountains.
original letters of 400 words or less
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