Hermiston man arrested in Kennewick homicide | REGION, A3
TUESDAy, MAy 10, 2022
146th year, No. 61
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WINNER OF 16 ONPA AWARDS IN 2021
DON’T DRINK THE WATER
SPECIAL REPORT: Port of Morrow’s excessive nitrogen dumps affect thousands
had been on the board for 52 years.
Most commissioners have been in
their positions throughout the port’s
explosive growth in size, profit and
wastewater.
By ALEX BAUMHARDT,
COLE SINANIAN AND JAEL
CALLOWAY
Oregon Capital Chronicle
B
OARDMAN — Guada-
lupe Martinez points to a
24-pack of bottled water
by her kitchen sink with
just a few bottles left,
one of thousands she’s
brought home during the
last 18 years.
“Ever since we’ve been living
here, we’ve been buying water,” she
said.
The 54-year-old grandmother
knows she can’t drink the water that
comes out of her tap. It would make
her and her family sick.
She is not alone.
Thousands of Oregonians near the
town of Boardman live atop an aqui-
fer so tainted with farming chemicals
that it’s not safe to drink.
State officials have known that for
more than 30 years. And so has one
source of that contamination — the
Port of Morrow.
Officials at the Oregon Depart-
ment of Environmental Quality
have known nitrate pollution in area
groundwater is putting the health
of largely low-income, Latino and
immigrant families at risk. An inves-
tigation by the Capital Chronicle
established that little has been done
about the port’s contribution to area
water contamination besides modest
fines and engaging in agreements
that the port in turn violated.
For years, port officials ille-
gally pumped millions of gallons of
wastewater containing nitrogen in
excess of what DEQ deemed safe.
They piped it out from their indus-
trial complex in Boardman to nearby
farms, which used it on their crop-
land. The nitrogen-rich water is free
— a vital commodity for farmers
who grow onions, potatoes, corn
and more. Once applied to the farm-
land, nitrogen transforms into nitrate
that in turn can make drinking water
unsafe.
Scientific reports show ground-
water in Morrow and Umatilla
counties has long been polluted
with nitrates above safe levels, the
majority of which comes from area
farms. The port’s excess disposal,
year by year, is suspected of making
the water even worse, according
to DEQ and the Lower Umatilla
Groundwater Basin Management
Area Committee, tasked with tack-
ling groundwater issues in the area
for the last 30 years.
Port authorities and regulators
knew all that, yet the port’s excess
pumping has continued to this day,
according to a three-month investiga-
tion by the Capital Chronicle involv-
ing hundreds of pages of agency
emails, records and more than a
dozen interviews.
The pollution grew as the port
grew, records show. Its industrial
customers came and expanded fast,
and port authorities chose to continue
Growing by billions of
dollars and gallons of
wastewater
Kathy Aney for Oregon Capital Chronicle
Guadalupe Martinez of Boardman says a reverse-osmosis filter installed under the sink doesn’t work properly,
and the whole-house filter behind her has been broken for years. Her family drinks bottled water to protect
themselves from nitrate-tainted groundwater.
READY TO MAKE A STAND
County Commissioner Doherty says
nitrates in Boardman water a threat to life
By PHIL WRIGHT
East Oregonian
BOARDMAN — Morrow
County Commissioner Jim
Doherty is making the water
pollution in his county a top prior-
ity.
“The nitrate issue in the
Columbia Basin has always
haunted me,” he said.
When he won election to the
county board five years ago, he
said he crafted a list of goals, and
the nitrate problem was on the list.
“Shamefully that is where the
ambition ended relative to the
work,” he said. “But in this occu-
pation, the best time to have done
something was years ago, the next
best time is now.”
When DEQ sent its notice
about the whopping port fine of
$1.3 million for nitrate pollution
in the upstream aquifer, Doherty
said that was a call of alarm he
heard to his core.
Discussion and a meeting
ensued almost immediately, he
said, just as it had for the past
30 years.
“Was this regulatory over-
reach?” he recalled. “Who were
applying more of the nitrogen-rich
water to more acres of land, rather
than investing in treating the water
and dramatically reducing nitrogen
levels.
The nitrogen, originating in crops
and the fertilizers put on area farm
fields, is washed off produce and
flushed into the port’s system.
Government regulators who could
have put a stop to it instead dallied
for years. They took only modest
steps to rein in the port’s pollution.
And health agencies charged with
protecting people such as Martinez
have done little to directly warn them
their water isn’t safe to drink, relying
on websites, community groups and
their participation in local fairs and
public events to do that work.
For the port, what enforcement
was imposed appeared to be simply
the cost of business. Two regulators
at DEQ wrote candidly in an inter-
nal memo that it was cheaper for the
port to pay a state fine than to spend
millions containing the pollution.
As the state prepared recently to
the primar y
suspects? Would
we come together
to craft a message
of solidarity?”
But Doherty
said one voice
was absent from
Doherty
that meeting.
“In my view, the greater
community were the only ones
not present then, nor at any time in
the past,” he said, “and I surmised,
potentially bearing the biggest
burden — that of real and present
health concerns.”
He then set out to test what resi-
dents were drinking from the end
results at the kitchen faucets.
Tests results, residents
deliver bleak picture
The top responsibility of the
local public health authority and
the board of commissioners, he
said, is public happiness and
health. His fellow commission-
ers gave the blessing for Doherty
to spend some resources for
100 expedited, if cursory, tests.
Commissioner Melissa Lindsay
even partnered with Umatilla
County Commissioner Dan
issue its largest fine yet to the port,
those two DEQ water specialists
wrote the excess nitrate was likely to
impact a community that is “dispro-
portionately comprised by an under-
educated populous, and also by
peoples of color.”
Port’s promise for
Northeastern Oregon
The Port of Morrow was founded
in 1953 with the ambition of turning
arid country on the shoulder of the
Columbia River into a job-producing
mecca about 150 miles east of Port-
land. It is one of 23 such agencies
formed in Oregon along waterways
to foster economic expansion.
The port has acquired 12,000
acres of surrounding land in the
decades since. That land now hosts
four industrial parks that include an
ethanol fuel plant, food processing
factories and a growing number of
data-processing centers. The port
and its industrial customers account
for about half of the jobs in Morrow
County, according to the port’s
Dorran on a bi-county effort to
secure a more long-range effort.
“I wasted little time in reach-
ing out to Ana Pineyro, our Public
Health Emergency Preparedness
coordinator, who has helped
me in the past and shines most
brightly as a community outreach
liaison,” Doherty said.
Morrow County is approach-
ing 50% Hispanic representa-
tion and as such, it is vital to have
someone like Ana who can bridge
that cross-cultural divide.”
They hit the streets with test
sample kits in hand, knocking
and walking.
“I was hopeful as the first
small set of samples were sent
off to Kuo Testing Labs in
Umatilla,” he recalled.
The testing company reported
it would email the results in the
ensuing days, he said, so a call
from the lab to his cellphone was
a bit of a surprise. He said the lab
technician explained Kuo Testing
is duty bound to warn people to
suspend using any water if test
results show there is an extreme
and immediate health concern.
See Stand, Page A9
recent economic analysis.
Operating from headquarters
in Boardman, a city of about 4,700,
the port is managed day to day by
an executive director, and governed
by a board of five who are elected
by those who live within the port’s
boundaries.
Today, that board includes Rick
Stokoe, chair, Marv Padberg, Jerry
Healy, John Murray and Joe Taylor.
Stokoe has served for seven years
and is the Boardman police chief.
Padberg, a farmer and director of
the Inland Development Corp., has
served for 28 years. That nonprofit
provides fiber optic internet in East-
ern Oregon.
Healy has served on the board for
27 years and also is president of the
Morrow Development Corp., which
finances business and development
projects in Morrow County. Taylor,
a farmer and a former director of the
Morrow Soil and Water Conserva-
tion District, has served for 16 years.
Murray, a pharmacist, was elected in
2019 to replace Larry Lindsay, who
At the confluence of the Union
Pacific Railroad line, the Colum-
bia River and Interstate 84, the port
grew into a main distribution point
for forest products, grains, root
vegetables, cattle and dairy prod-
ucts produced in Oregon, Washing-
ton, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming,
according to the port’s 2021
economic analysis.
Between 2006 and 2021, the
port’s annual economic output went
from $896 million to more than $2.5
billion, the port reported.
Locally and regionally grown
crops are trucked to Boardman,
where they are processed into food
products. That requires billions
of gallons of water each year. The
nitrogen from fertilized crops and
food products gets washed into the
processing water that is then pumped
into one of two storage ponds at the
port, according to port officials. From
there, the wastewater is pumped out
to five farms through a system of
pipes and pumps.
In 2012, the port handled about
2.6 billion gallons of wastewater per
year. Now, it’s up to about 3.6 billion
gallons of wastewater each year,
according to the port. The bulk of the
nitrogen in that wastewater comes
from two Lamb Weston facilities at
the port where French fries, hash-
browns and other potato products are
made, according to the port’s water
discharge reports.
The food processors, like Lamb
Weston, pay the port to handle the
wastewater. Payments from the
processors to the port for handling
the wastewater make up 22% of the
port’s operating revenue. In 2001,
the port made about $2 million from
the wastewater. By 2021, the fee was
bringing in nearly $7 million.
The farmers who receive the
water don’t pay for it, but do share in
the costs of getting it to their farms.
One is Jake Madison, who owns
17,000 acres in Echo, about 16 miles
from the port. He’s the fourth gener-
ation on the farm, and he and his dad,
for decades, have put on their crops
wastewater from a Lamb Weston
French fry plant in Hermiston.
“I was kind of born and raised
in managing a reuse farm,” Madi-
son said, using the reuse term that is
preferred by port officials in describ-
ing their wastewater.
Around 2010, he wanted to get on
the port’s wastewater system as well,
saving him hundreds of thousands
of dollars in fertilizer and provid-
ing access to more water. It took him
five years to strike a deal, in large part
because port officials suddenly had a
pressing need for more land to use for
disposing of wastewater.
“We said, ‘OK, you know, given
your permit and the project that we
can build, there should be a good
long-term fix for you,” he said.
The port invested $20 million in
pipes and pumps that would move
wastewater to a pond on Madison’s
farm to then be spread over 2,800
acres of, at that time, onions, pota-
toes and grass seed.
But it also meant he signed up to
work within the limits DEQ imposed
on the volume of nitrogen-rich waste-
water that could be applied. He had
to track how much wastewater he
applied and submit to annual soil
and crop testing. That would tell the
port and DEQ how much nitrogen the
crops were taking up, and how much
nitrate was making it to the ground-
water.
But the port, not Madison, is
responsible for seeing the DEQ
conditions were obeyed — and
for facing consequences when
they aren’t.
See Water, Page A9