NEWS
WEDNESDAY, MAY 11, 2022
HERMISTONHERALD.COM • A3
Port of Morrow pollutes water for years
State has taken little
action on nitrate
contamination
By ALEX BAUMHARDT, COLE
SINANIAN AND JAEL CALLOWAY
Oregon Capital Chronicle
Guadalupe
Martinez
points to a 24-pack of bot-
tled water by her kitchen
sink with just a few bottles
left, one of thousands she’s
brought home over the last
18 years.
“Ever since we’ve been
living here, we’ve been buy-
ing water,” she said.
The 54-year-old grand-
mother 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 Board-
man live atop an aquifer so
tainted with farming chemi-
cals that it’s not safe to drink.
State
offi cials
have
known that for more than 30
years. And so has one source
of that contamination — the
Port of Morrow.
Offi cials at the Ore-
gon Department of Envi-
ronmental Quality have
known nitrate pollution in
area groundwater is putting
the health of largely low-in-
come, Latino and immigrant
families at risk. An investi-
gation by the Capital Chron-
icle established that little has
been done about the port’s
contribution to area water
contamination besides mod-
est fi nes and engaging in
agreements that the port in
turn violated.
For years, port offi cials
illegally pumped millions of
gallons of wastewater con-
taining nitrogen in excess
of what was DEQ deemed
safe. They piped it out from
their industrial complex in
Boardman to nearby farm-
ers, which used it on their
cropland. The nitrogen-rich
water is free — a vital com-
modity for farmers who
grow onions, potatoes, corn
and more. Once applied to
the farmland, nitrogen trans-
forms into nitrate that in turn
can make drinking water
unsafe.
Scientifi c reports show
groundwater in Morrow and
Umatilla counties has long
been polluted with nitrates
above safe levels, the major-
ity of which comes from area
farms. The port’s excess dis-
posal, year by year, is sus-
pected of making the water
even worse, according to
DEQ and the Lower Uma-
tilla Groundwater Basin
Management Area Com-
mittee, tasked with tackling
groundwater issues in the
area for the last 30 years.
Port authorities and reg-
ulators knew all that, yet
the port’s excess pumping
has continued to this day,
according to a three-month
investigation by the Capi-
tal Chronicle involving hun-
dreds 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
applying more of the nitro-
gen-rich water to more acres
of land, rather than investing
in treating the water and dra-
matically reducing nitrogen
levels.
The nitrogen, originat-
ing in crops and the fer-
tilizers put on area farm
fi elds, is washed off produce
and fl ushed 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 pollu-
tion. And health agencies
charged with protecting peo-
ple 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 reg-
ulators at DEQ wrote can-
didly in an internal memo
Kathy Aney for Oregon Capital Chronicle
Guadalupe Martinez of Boardman says a reverse-osmosis fi lter installed under the sink doesn’t work properly, and the whole-
house fi lter behind her has been broken for years. Her family drinks bottled water to protect themselves from nitrate-tainted
groundwater.
WHAT IS NITRATE?
MORE ONLINE
Nitrate is a naturally occurring chemical compound.
Characteristics: Colorless, tasteless and odorless.
Uses: Commonly used in fertilizers and in explosives.
Human consumption: Nitrate occurs naturally at safe levels
in some foods and can be in drinking water supplies at
levels that pose no health risk.
Limits: The federal Environmental Protection Agency set
the limit of 10 parts per million for nitrate in drinking water
before it becomes unsafe to drink over long periods. Nitrate
levels over 10 parts per million may result in serious health
defects that can aff ect all ages, but are especially harmful to
infants and pregnant women.
Health risks: Research from the National Cancer Institute
reports that consuming water with nitrate up to even fi ve
parts per million over long periods of time can increase
the risk of colon cancer, stomach cancer and several other
cancers
A longer version of this
story and more photo-
graphs are available
online at www.
hermistonherald.com.
that it was cheaper for the
port to pay a state fi ne than
to spend millions containing
the pollution.
As the state prepared
recently to issue its largest
fi ne yet to the port, those two
DEQ water specialists wrote
the excess nitrate was likely
to impact a community that
is “disproportionately com-
prised by an undereducated
populus, 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 Portland.
It is one of 23 such agen-
cies formed in Oregon along
waterways to foster eco-
nomic expansion.
The port has acquired
12,000 acres of surround-
ing 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-pro-
cessing centers. The port
and its industrial custom-
ers account for about half of
the jobs in Morrow County,
according to the port’s recent
economic analysis.
Operating from headquar-
ters in Boardman, a city of
about 4,700, the port is man-
aged day to day by an exec-
utive director, and governed
by a board of fi ve who are
elected by those who live
within the port’s boundaries.
Today, that board includes
Rick Stokoe, chair, Marv Pad-
berg, Jerry Healy, John Mur-
ray and Joe Taylor. Stokoe
has served for seven years
and is the Boardman police
chief. Murray, a farmer and
director of the Inland Devel-
opment Corp., has served for
28 years. That nonprofi t pro-
vides fi ber optic internet in
Eastern Oregon.
Healy has served on the
board for 27 years and also
is president of the Morrow
Development Corp., which
fi nances business and devel-
opment projects in Morrow
County. Taylor, a farmer and
a former director of the Mor-
row Soil and Water Conser-
vation District, has served for
16 years. Murray, a pharma-
cist, was elected in 2019 to
replace Larry Lindsay, who
had been on the board for 52
years.
Most
commissioners
have been in their positions
throughout the port’s explo-
sive growth in size, profi t and
wastewater.
Growing by billions of dollars
and gallons of wastewater
At the confl uence of the
Union Pacifi c Railroad line,
the Columbia River and Inter-
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state 84, the port grew into a
main distribution point for
forest products, grains, root
vegetables, cattle and dairy
products produced in Oregon,
Washington, 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 mil-
lion to more than $2.5 billion,
the port reported.
Locally and regionally
grown crops are trucked to
Boardman, where they are
processed into food prod-
ucts. 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
offi cials. From there, the
wastewater is pumped out to
fi ve 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,
hashbrowns and other potato
products are made, according
to port and the port’s water
discharge reports.
The food processors, like
Lamb Weston, pay the port to
handle the wastewater. Pay-
ments 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 waste-
water. 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 get-
ting 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 generation
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,” Madison said, using
the reuse term that is pre-
ferred by port offi cials in
describing their wastewater.
Around 2010, he wanted
to get on the port’s wastewa-
ter system as well, saving him
hundreds of thousands of dol-
lars in fertilizer and providing
access to more water. It took
him fi ve years to strike a deal,
in large part because port offi -
cials 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 fi x for you,” he said.
The port invested $20 mil-
lion 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,
potatoes and grass seed.
But it also meant he signed
up to work within the limits
DEQ imposed on the volume
of nitrogen-rich wastewa-
ter that could be applied. He
had to track how much waste-
water he applied and submit
to annual soil and crop test-
ing. That would tell the port
and DEQ how much nitrogen
the crops were taking up, and
how much nitrate was mak-
ing it to the groundwater.
But the port, not Madi-
son, is responsible for see-
ing the DEQ conditions were
obeyed — and for facing con-
sequences when they aren’t.
When the port is fac-
ing potential trouble with its
wastewater, farmers receiv-
ing the water get a call from
the port.
Madison said such conver-
sations start with Miff Devin,
its water specialist.
The water permit
The port’s fi rst permit
from DEQ to discharge
water onto area farmland
came in 1974. Since then,
that government permis-
sion to dump nitrogen-rich
water has been modifi ed
and renewed dozens of
times.
Now, the permit requires
port offi cials to monitor
every step in the process to
detect and track nitrogen
and nitrate. That duty falls to
Devin.
He was hired by the port
in 1998 as an IT specialist. In
2011, he added water quality
specialist to his duties.
He took on both roles
when the port automated its
water system.
“How a pump works is
basically a giant computer,
and then that evolved,”
Devin explained.
As water quality super-
visor, he is tasked to ensure
the port is within environ-
mental regulations from
DEQ, the Oregon Health
Authority and Oregon Water
Resources Department. Part
of his job is to develop ways
to improve and maintain
water quality, according to
the port.
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