What nitrate water pollution means for residents in Eastern Oregon

For three decades, many residents in Eastern Oregon’s Umatilla basin have been drinking nitrate-polluted drinking water. Some residents blame nearby food-processors and farms that use nitrogen-rich fertilizers for the issue.

Last week, a $6.2 million settlement was reached between Madison Ranches and the people living in Morrow and Umatilla Counties who filed the suit. Kaleb Lay, director of policy and research at Oregon Rural Action, took OPB’s Think Out Loud on a tour of affected areas, along with Jim Doherty, a rancher and former Morrow County Commissioner. We’ll also hear from Paulo Lopez whose well is polluted.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, coming to you this week from Umatilla and Morrow counties. Many Oregonians take safe drinking water for granted. They have faith that the water that comes out of their taps will not make them or their loved ones sick. That is not the case for thousands of households in the Lower Umatilla Basin. State authorities have known for nearly four decades that nitrates from agricultural runoff have contaminated groundwater here. According to testing, the problem is only getting worse. An ongoing lawsuit alleges that as many as 46,000 people here are affected.

Four years ago, the Morrow County Commission took an unprecedented step. They became the first county to declare a state of emergency because of water quality issues. That effort was led by a local rancher-turned-county commissioner named Jim Doherty. I sat down with him yesterday and asked what led him to push for that emergency declaration.

Jim Doherty: It’s interesting. In 2016, I was elected as county commissioner and I wrote down 20 things that I wanted to work on. A lot of folks in the ag industry or knew what was going on in the area, knew that there was a building nitrate challenge. So I wrote that down as one of my 20 goals. Over the first three or four years I got busy. I got elected as president of the Association of Oregon Counties and spent a lot of time in D.C. and Salem advocating for all of Oregon.

Fast forward to 2022, and the Port of Morrow Industrial Park got fined $2 million for violating their wastewater permit just outside of town 2,164 times. They had a rather clandestine meeting with the county and the industries that were creating these issues, and they wanted to push back on DEQ. I said, “Well, has anybody gone out and looked to see if there’s any health consequences or gone outside of the known plume.” And they kind of looked at me like I wasn’t a member of the team much any longer.

So the next day I went out and I got six vials. I went one each mile outside of town on the private wells and shipped it off to the lab. They called me and I said [to] just email me. They said, ‘Well, we’re duty bound, if it’s an immediate health hazard, to call you.” And I said, “Which sample?” And they said, “All six.” So I knew it was over a much larger area that had been before.

Within a week, I went down and got 70 samples. I stopped and picked up a bilingual public health person because this county, if it’s not already Oregon’s first majority minority, it’s really close – certainly has a lot of Hispanic folks and English as a second language. We went out into the community, and I tested 70 of the wells. The public health person that was there asked six nitrate-related questions: whether it was persistent abdominal issues, persistent headaches, thyroid issues, kidney issues, miscarriages, and I can’t recall the sixth at this time. But when I sent those 70 samples – I basically went from the Gilliam County line to the Umatilla County line, randomly across – they called me on 68 of the 70 samples.

When I got that information, I went down to public health and I said, “Oh my Lord, look at this!” They’d compiled the questionnaire from the folks and said, “That pales by comparison to our data.” It was something like the first 30 homes we went into, half a dozen people were living with one kidney. Most everybody had persistent abdominal and headache issues, which is just a precursor, right? It’s the canary in the coal mine telling them that there’s something wrong. Twenty-five of the first 30 homes had miscarriages, largely in the West Glen area. And several of them were multiple, right? So I knew inherently and said, “Oh my God, we have got a public health emergency.”

So I convened the county commission. One of the three commissioners didn’t show up, so it was just myself and Commissioner Lindsay. We sat down and that same public health person was there. By and large the county commission meetings are the commissioners and a few staff. This one, there were hordes of people online and lots of people in the room, and it was the industry folks. It was the Lamb Weston folks, or Tillamook folks, or the large farms or dairies. They pushed back mightily.

But we kept pushing forward and I laid out the data. Ultimately, the other commissioner agreed with me, and we declared Oregon’s first public health groundwater state of emergency.

Miller: I wanna go back to something you said early on there, which is that when you first went to the Port, they pushed back. You said it was like you weren’t on their team. Can you describe the politics and the power structure in this region, when it comes to this issue?

Doherty: Yeah. I mean, it’s billions of dollars. It’s what makes the Port work. They take all these industries that come in, largely food processors, and they get paid to get rid of their water. The Port had known for 25 or 30 years that they needed more lagoons or secondary treatment. But that costs money. They just spread these high nitrate water outside the town so everybody could make money. In the county, during my tenure, we had the third highest average income in the state, behind Washington and Multnomah County, clear out here on the east side. But at the same time, we had the third highest poverty level.

Miller: How do you explain that?

Doherty: There were a lot of folks making six digits. The big factory folks, the owners of Windwave Communications, working with these data centers. But then you had the cogs in the wheel. You had the guys out there cleaning the cow flop, if I might, out at the dairies and making $25,000 a year. So, as well as everybody was doing, it wasn’t “a rising tide floats all boats.” Certainly, those folks getting very rich on what was going on out here, and then those folks were having the other folks come over and mow their lawn. I mean, like I say, we were quickly becoming a third world country.

So the powerful were getting more powerful and it was also quite lucrative for them. It was profit over people. You heard the old axiom that if you have your health, you have everything. I think that still holds true, but it didn’t hold true to their mindset.

Miller: Listening to you right now, I gotta say you remind me a little bit of some things I’ve heard from Bernie Sanders. When you talk about profits over people and corporate greed. You ran though just recently as a Republican for state legislature in the primary. Has doing this work in the last couple of years changed the way you think about your own political identity?

Doherty: I think I’m a conservative fellow, certainly fiscally. Every day, when I step out into the neighborhood, I don’t look and see, what is the ideology, what is the leadership, what do they want to do? I say what does my neighbor need? I don’t ask if they’re a D or an R.

I liken myself to a Tom McCall Republican. I mean, Tom McCall loved Oregon and loved its beauty, and said, I’d hate to see her as a “hungry hussy throwing herself at every smokestack” that came our way. And he saved the Oregon coast. He got a lot of pushback when he did it. If you tried to save the Oregon coast today, you couldn’t get it done. But now, everybody, R’s or D’s, loves our Oregon coast. So I liken it to that a little bit. You got to go out there and just do what’s right in the moment.

Miller: Is it fair to say that when you think of that Tom McCall example of the Oregon coast 50 or so years ago, that data centers are what you have in mind in the 2020s?

Doherty: Yeah. I mentioned the other day, I was talking to somebody … I said that Tom McCall would be rolling over in his grave if he’d seen what we’re doing out here, not just to the water, but to the land and to the power. This is not the Oregon he envisioned and certainly not the one that I grew up in.

Miller: Jim Doherty, thanks very much.

Doherty: Yeah, thank you for your time.

Miller [narration]: That was Jim Doherty, a rancher and former Morrow County commissioner.

To get a sense for the scale of nitrate contamination in the Lower Umatilla Basin, we had Kaleb Lay drive us around. Kaleb is the director of policy and research at Oregon Rural Action. The nonprofit has become one of the most prominent groups fighting for clean drinking water in the area. The first stop on our tour was an industrial complex at the Port of Boardman. I asked Kaleb a question about time.

Miller: Nitrate pollution has been something that the state of Oregon has been focused on in this area since at least 1990. Why has it been going on so long?

Kaleb Lay: Well, I think the short answer to that is economics. There is a lot of money to be made here in the production of things that require a lot of nitrogen: crops, wastewater, large and heavy industry … [sound of a semi passing]. I’m sorry.

Miller: No, that’s heavy industry going by you right now.

Lay: Exactly. Basically, nitrate comes from synthetic fertilizers. Because this area is so sandy, our soils are so sandy, when you spread fertilizer on top of the land here and wash it down with irrigation water, it flushes through the soil really, really fast. It gets into groundwater, and that’s the primary source of drinking water for almost everyone who lives here. Now, because we have so much land available here and so many food processors, there’s sort of this feedback loop of supply and demand, where we’re constantly making more and more and more, and there was a lot of money to be made in creating all of those crops and then processing them.

Now, one thing to keep in mind is that at every step of the way in this process of making all of this processed food, you’re adding more nitrogen back into the cycle. When it’s out on the land, you’re adding synthetic fertilizers that are full of nitrogen. Those crops then go into food processors where they create a lot of wastewater washing and processing those, say, potatoes, corn, onions or whatever it may be. That wastewater then gets sent back out onto those fields full of excess nitrogen. So you’re just adding it back onto the land over and over and over. All the while, it keeps getting further into the groundwater and poisoning people’s drinking water.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for the scale of those industrial agriculture and food processing operations that are within a 30-mile radius or so of here?

Lay: Sure. The entire Lower Umatilla Basin Groundwater Management Area, as it’s called – or LUBGWMA, a real clunky acronym – is around 550 square miles. So 20 miles in any direction, you’re basically in it. Thinking about the scale of production, I think it’s important to distinguish between the different types of farming that we have out here. Most people, [when] you say farming, they think growing hay on a couple of acres, big red barn, pasture with some cows. It’s very different, what we have here.

Miller: Or in the Willamette Valley, with big grass seed operations or huge hop farms … I think a lot of Oregonians are used to large-scale farms. But you’re saying that in this part of Northeast Oregon, it’s even on a different scale?

Lay: I would say that, yeah. And part of that is the engineering involved. Like I said, we’re a very sandy area. Effectively we’re in a high desert here. To be able to grow a lot of these crops [in a desert], like potatoes and corn that require a lot of nitrogen and a lot of water, requires tons and tons of irrigation water. So we’re constantly creating infrastructure to pump water either from groundwater or from the Columbia out onto these fields, at really incredible scales. Things like pumping wastewater from the Port, 16 miles up into the lowlands to reuse as irrigation water.

The problem with that is that, one, that’s disposal of a waste that has tons of contaminants in it. And when you spread it up in the lowlands, well, groundwater flows the same way the surface water does. It wants to flow downhill, and it flows downhill back toward the population centers where people are drawing groundwater for their drinking water.

Now, on top of that, we’re talking about scale. We’re talking billions of dollars every year in economic output. The Port of Morrow, itself, in a county of 15,000 people in Morrow County, claims $2.5 billion per year in economic output, or $2.3 million per day in productivity. That is a colossal amount of money, especially in a county where only 15,000 people and change live, and where, on top of that, we have a disproportionately low-income population even after all this time.

Miller: Why did you bring us here and where are we right now?

Lay: Right now, we’re standing at what is sort of a soccer field in the middle of the Port’s main industrial campus. On one side of us we have Oregon Potato Company and one of the Lamb Weston facilities here, where they make a lot of processed potato products. Basically, they’re big factories that make processed food.

Miller: Like french fries.

Lay: French fries, tater tots, that sort of thing.

On the other side we have cold storage, where you can see where we’re standing one of the massive collector wells that the Port has drawing from deep groundwater. And then past that, it sort of becomes a very, very large power plant and an ocean of other food processors and data centers.

Miller: What’s the problem with nitrates? I mean, you were outlining the scale of this and some part of the mechanism for how it’s ended up in people’s drinking water. Why is it a problem when it does get there?

Lay: Nitrate is a nasty little chemical. For a long time, we’ve known in the United States that nitrate can cause a condition called methemoglobinemia, which is more commonly known as blue baby syndrome. It’s as awful as it sounds. Nitrate likes to grab onto your red blood cells where oxygen is supposed to go. In infants, that can be really dangerous, very simply because they don’t have a lot of blood to go around.

But what we’ve found more and more, as we continue to research nitrate in drinking water especially, is that when you’re drinking it for long periods of time, it’s linked to a laundry list of really alarming health problems. Everything from preterm birth and low birth weight to birth defects and miscarriages, really concerning for pregnant women.

Then later in life, a laundry list of cancers, especially of the gastrointestinal tracts: stomach, bladder, colorectal. There are some studies that suggest some emerging links to later-in-life neurological issues like dementia. So, really a nasty little chemical. All of this is happening … Generally, what these studies are finding, from 3-5 parts per million (ppm) and sometimes up to 10 [ppm]. And the drinking water for people around here is well above that, an order of magnitude even.

Miller: When you say 3-5 [ppm], my understanding was that the state of Oregon DEQ, based on maybe federal guidelines, says we’re gonna really worry when it’s over 10 [ppm]. But you’re saying that that threshold is maybe too low?

Lay: Yeah, I think that 10 mg/L, 10 ppm figure is set much too high. That’s set only based on methemoglobinemia, that blue baby syndrome. That figure doesn’t take into account the many, many studies we’ve done in the last 20 years, across the country and the world, that show those links at much, much lower levels. Three to 5 [ppm] seems to be a pretty common figure that crops up.

The federal government sets that 10 ppm threshold for blue baby syndrome. Here in the LUBGWMA, the goal has been to get it down to 7 [ppm], so we have some wiggle room. But the entire time the LUBGWMA has existed, since 1990, we’ve been going up in nitrate levels, not down. That’s still true as of January 2025.

Miller: Even that takes into account recent years when ostensibly this has become a bigger political issue and, for example, the governor of Oregon has said, I’m gonna take this really seriously. We’re gonna have a task force, we’re gonna change agricultural rules, we’re gonna make this better. You’re saying that even in that time the situation has gotten worse, not better?

Lay: Absolutely. You don’t have to take my word for that. DEQ studies from as early as last year show that the overall trend across the entire LUBGWMA is still going up, in terms of nitrate levels. You can hear that, just in talking to people who live here too. Folks are getting their wells tested every year now. Folks who didn’t get their well tested ever, four or five years ago, now they’re getting it tested every year. And they’re watching their level go up and up and up, and that’s frustrating for them, to say the least.

Miller [narration]: From that first site in the Port’s main industrial complex, Kaleb drove us near a wastewater storage area and past some fields where wastewater has been dumped for decades. We ended up at a nearby residential neighborhood in Boardman called West Glen that’s been heavily impacted by nitrates.

Now, in the last few years, the state has been providing some water testing, along with water delivery and filtration. I asked Kaleb what’s that looked like.

Lay: I’d say it really started with some local action. The county declared a drinking water emergency after there was some door-to-door testing done, and then ORA stepped in with the county to test a bunch of wells.

Miller: That’s your organization?

Lay: Yeah, Oregon Rural Action. We stepped in to help test some wells with the county and the public health department. Out of that sprung this effort by the state of Oregon to test as many wells as possible and then get some sort of like a band-aid solution for safe drinking water to all the folks who are affected.

Miller: What did they learn and what did you learn when you started doing regular testing of the water coming out of people’s taps in this neighborhood?

Lay: The first thing we learned was how widespread and severe it was. Of the early testing that we did, most of the households where we did rapid tests – where you just dip a stick in the water, pull it out, watch the color change – many, many of those were well beyond safe limits. People had been drinking poisoned water, and almost none of them knew that there was even a problem to be wary of.

Miller: I didn’t mention this earlier, but what I’ve read is this is odorless and colorless. So without testing, you’d have no idea that what you’re drinking could be very harmful to your health or your baby’s health, right?

Lay: Yep. Odorless, colorless, tasteless. If you don’t test for it, there’s no way to know except for getting sick.

Miller: All right. So let’s say that the state tests your water and it’s found out that it’s 10 times over what you already had said was maybe too high of an official limit. What options do people have?

Lay: Yeah, and 10 times over the official safe drinking water limit is not hyperbole either. There’s a well in Hermiston tested at 95 [ppm]. The safe limit under state law is 10 [ppm]. So if you do test above 10 [ppm], a couple of things can happen. One, you can get a filter. But filters will only work up to about 27 ppm. Anything beyond that, they won’t bring you down below 10 [ppm], reliably. And, as we discussed, nitrate levels are still going up too. So getting a filter, if your level keeps going up past 27 [ppm], you could be in some trouble there too.

Miller: Just to be clear, when you say a filter, is that for all the water that you’d use in your house, or is it just to get a little bit of drinking water?

Lay: Yeah, it’s not a whole-house system. Essentially, it’s just a little system that spits out a little stream of clean water right at your kitchen tap. All the rest of the water in your house, coming out of your well, is still unsafe to drink. Which is a big problem because a lot of people will absent-mindedly do things like brush their teeth or grab a glass of water out of the bathroom sink at night. And EPA defines nitrate as an acute contaminant, a single exposure is harmful to your health.

Miller: OK, so one of the things the state is doing is providing these filters to get a small amount of drinking water. But, as you’re saying, that only works if your water is at a low enough level that the filter can take it down to a relatively safe level. What happens for people whose number is above 27 [ppm]?

Lay: For the rest of those folks, the only option right now is to drink out of 5-gallon bottles. There are a couple of water delivery services out here, and the state will deliver those 5-gallon bottles to your doorstep. From there, you’re just living your life out of those jugs. For most households in the Lower Umatilla Basin who are above that 10 mg/L range, they’re using the bottles. Because the nitrate levels are so high.

Miller: Last week, in an ongoing lawsuit, brought by people first right here in this community, one of the defendants settled. Madison Ranches agreed to pay $6.2 million. But the lawsuit against Lamb Weston – the huge food processor we were talking about earlier – the Port of Morrow, Threemile Canyon Farms, Portland General Electric and Columbia River Processing is still going forward. Where does that suit stand right now?

Lay: As I understand it, it’s interesting because the Port’s scheduled a special meeting for later this month after the news about Madison Ranches dropped. As far as the class action goes, all the defendants are really looking for is some measure of accountability and a change in practice. What they’re asking for is, help us cover the costs to solve this pollution problem that you all caused in the first place, and that we’re being asked now to pay for. And then stop polluting, stop dumping so much nitrogen on your land. Stop polluting the groundwater. Stop making the situation worse. I can’t speak for anyone in the lawsuit or any of the defendants, but I would be surprised if any of them want this to be drawn out much further. This is not a good look for them.

Miller: Madison Ranches, as part of the settlement, which is pretty standard, did not admit any wrongdoing, any negligence. They said, basically, we want to put this behind us. Here’s $6.2 million. They also said, though, that their farm is going to continue to use practices proven to minimize nitrate pollution, including, they said, testing the soil before planting and after harvests, rotating crops and measuring the nitrogen content of fertilizers before applying them on the soil. What do you make of that statement?

Lay: That sounds like a bare minimum. Know how much nitrogen is going out on your field, account for all of it, and make sure that you’re taking off as much as you put on. That’s what every farm in the basin should be doing. The folks like Madison Ranches, Windy River, all the folks who are using industrial wastewater, there are at least some guard rails, so that we know how much nitrogen they’ve been using. When they’ve made mistakes and when they’ve polluted groundwater by overapplying, there’s been some record so that we can hold them accountable.

But for a lot of the other operations out here, the massive corporate-scale agricultural irrigation systems, there’s no accountability for that. It’s the wild west. They don’t have to report how much they use or how much they pull off or any of that stuff. I think we should take those bare minimums and spread that out to the rest of the sources of nitrogen.

Miller: What is the Oregon Department of Agriculture doing about that? My understanding is that just this year, they rolled out some finalized rules that are intended to reduce nitrate exposure, nitrate contamination in water systems. So what’s ODA doing?

Lay: This comes out of some of the community’s efforts to get the state to step up. The governor had the state agencies – DEQ, Department of Agriculture, Oregon Health Authority, Water Resources Department – all get together to put together a plan for addressing this, because we’re 36 years in and it’s still getting worse. All those agencies got together. The Department of Ag is responsible for that piece that’s not under permits, all those big irrigators. Essentially, they got Oregon Rural Action, a couple of nonprofits, and then a bunch of those irrigators and the lobbyists who represent those irrigators into a room, and said, how would you like to be regulated?

I don’t think it’s any surprise at all that those regulations came out fairly watered down. Basically, all it requires is that those large operations have a plan, get it certified by an agronomist, and then keep records. They don’t have to share those records with the Department of Ag. They don’t submit them to the state. The logic here is that the farms would have to allow the state to come onto the farm and audit those records out of a file cabinet. If, by some miracle, they actually got the staff and resources to be able to do that. ODA is wildly understaffed and overworked at this point already.

Miller: I want to go back to one of the bigger issues that we started with, which is the industrial scale of this agriculture and the gigantic quantities of nitrogen or nitrates that are being applied or, in some cases, sort of concentrated by industrial processes. What are you asking for in the big picture? Because we’re talking about global food supply chains on some level, of frozen boxes of french fries going all over the world, literally all over the world from right here in this area. It doesn’t seem like that’s gonna stop. What is the meaningful solution, though, for this problem in this area?

Lay: Real quickly, to the scale point … Just looking at Threemile Canyon Farms, where the Tillamook plant here gets most of its milk, if you were to take all of the solid and liquid manure and waste that they create in one year and put it on a train with no engines, just freight cars and tanker cars – freight for the solid, tankers for the liquid – that train would be 170 miles long. And they create that every single year, and they dump that on the same land every single year. The scale of the nitrogen pollution out here is off the charts.

What we want is for that contamination to stop. Not for the economics to stop, not for the industries to go away, because we need all of that for our economy out here, for people to have jobs and put food on their tables. What we want though is for all of those wastes to be handled as the hazardous material that they are. Things have been way too reckless. We have a lack of regulation of all those nonpoint, large, irrigated sources. We need the state to be more aggressive with permits. Then the most important thing here is that, right now, folks with polluted wells are being told that they’re gonna have to absorb the cost of solving this problem.

Miller: Meaning what? So we’re 50 feet away from a house right here. What are people in this neighborhood being told? What’s the proposed local solution for them right now?

Lay: Right here in West Glen in South Boardman, essentially the proposal is that the city of Boardman’s water lines will get extended into the neighborhood, and then they will start paying significantly elevated water bills moving forward.

Miller: They would then be getting city water which comes from under the Columbia, which has some but less nitrate pollution, way less than they have in their wells under us right now?

Lay: There’s nitrate and PFAS [per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances] in the city of Boardman’s drinking water. But it’s below those legal limits, significantly less than people have in their wells.

Miller: Why do you think that that potential solution is not fair?

Lay: Because the people in this community did not cause this pollution. They should not be the ones paying for it. That should be the billion-dollar corporations that have been actively making this problem worse for the last 30 to 40 years and are still doing it today.

Miller: Does the $6 million put forward in the settlement last week by one farming operation, the $20 million in a settlement by Amazon four months ago come close? Do those kinds of numbers come close to the cost you’re talking about, or the city’s talking about, for extending water lines?

Lay: It’s a start. But what we need is, one, the infrastructure built in the short term. The water lines and the repaving of the roads, that’s gonna cost millions of dollars. Then, two, a fund so that people can have those water bills paid. Here’s the rub. I can hear in my head the people who are listening and saying, “Oh well, I have to pay for my water, they should have to pay for their water too.”

But the people here in West Glen have already paid for their water. They paid tens of thousands of dollars for the wells that they can no longer use. They paid for the maintenance. They paid for the electricity to run it. And now they’re paying in medical bills for the health conditions they have, for pollution that was caused by corporations that literally rake in hundreds of millions of dollars every single year just in profits to their shareholders.

Miller: Can you introduce me to some of those people?

Lay: You got it.

Paulo Lopez [through interpreter Zaira Sanchez]: My name is Paulo Lopez, and I have lived in the Boardman area for more than 30 years.

Miller [narration]: After our tour, we headed back to the Oregon Rural Action Office. Kaleb introduced us to Paulo, along with an interpreter named Zaira Sanchez.

When was your water first tested?

Lopez: About four years ago.

Miller: And what did you find out?

Lopez: High levels of nitrate.

Miller: Were you surprised?

Lopez: Yes, I was very surprised because my water didn’t need to have that type of contamination present. So I’ve been involved in this issue for more than four years, representing my mom who is the well owner. So I come to represent her interests in her place.

Miller: Has anyone in your family had health issues that you suspect are caused by nitrates in the water?

Lopez: I think my dad is someone that could have been impacted because he drank a lot of the water. However, it was his lungs that were affected. So recently I was thinking more about this and I actually had purchased a pool for my kids to swim in there at my mother’s property. I’ve been wondering if my grandson, who’s 4 years old, might have been impacted. I’m not sure, but he seems to have some sort of issue that hopefully will get resolved or have some understandings here soon.

Miller: What kind of water filtration or water delivery does your family have now?

Lopez: So we’ve been receiving four jugs of the 5-gallons every two weeks. And we use that to cook and drink.

Miller: What’s it like to tell your grandson or other young people, these are the rules, don’t drink any of the water out of the tap, be careful when you’re swimming, [and] when you brush your teeth, be careful … What’s it like to tell the people you love about all of this?

Lopez: First of all, over the last four years, when we first learned that we weren’t supposed to cook or drink due to the impacts this could have on our health, I thought about my mom. She was particularly going through dialysis for her kidneys, dealing with that issue for much of her life. We were worried that the exposure to that water, while she was bathing, could have some type of effects on her. And soon, after much waiting, she received feedback from a wait list for the kidney transplant that she was waiting for. We grew concerned that she was going to possibly have complications. So there was worry that she wouldn’t be eligible due to that contamination.

So lastly, just to answer your question about the concerns with the kids. It was a challenge having to tell the kids over and over again to be careful when swimming because they might consume the water. Or having to warn them constantly until they were trained to know to be mindful of what water they were drinking when they were at grandma’s house.

Miller: I’ve heard that you’ve become a kind of community leader here. What are you doing?

Lopez: So, I primarily care about my mom. But I also care about my neighbors. I’ve known a lot of people over the years who have dealt with serious health issues. And for me, I feel frustrated, urgency that we need to take action and do something to defend ourselves.

Miller: What do you think of what the state government has already done?

Lopez: In my opinion, they’ve tried to do something, but it’s not noticeable. I think something needs to be done where it can be more visible so we can see the impact.

Miller: If you were talking directly to state leaders right now, what would you tell them?

Lopez: I would say, where’s the action you said you’d take? What about the promises that you made to our community, to my son in particular? Not just words, but action.

Miller: Paulo, thanks very much.

Lopez: No problem. I hope that this can help us move forward with our problem.

Miller: Paulo Lopez has lived in the Boardman area for more than 30 years. We also heard from Kaleb Lay, the director of policy and research at Oregon Rural Action, and former Morrow County Commissioner Jim Doherty. Later this week, we’ll get the perspective of irrigators in the area.

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