Rolling Stone reports:

In the spring of 2022, Jim Doherty kept having the same conversation with folks at the only grocery store in Boardman, his eastern Oregon hometown, or at the grain depot where he picked up food for his four ranch dogs. Healthy adults that these people knew were coming down with unexplained medical conditions, including diseases and cancers that usually afflicted the elderly. “It was kinda grim,” Doherty says.

Sixty years old, broad-chested, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, Doherty had been running a cattle ranch business with his wife for 25 years when he entered public service in 2016, winning a seat on Morrow County’s three-person board of commissioners.

What stood out about those conversations was the way people connected them to a problem with water in the area. Doherty knew what they meant: The county’s underground water supply had been tainted with nitrates — a byproduct of chemical fertilizers used by the megafarms and food processing plants where most of his constituents worked.

The aquifer underneath Morrow County, known as the Lower Umatilla Basin, is the only source of water for as many as 45,000 residents in and around the county, the majority of whom rely on private wells that draw on the basin. Since 1991, regulators at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) have been collecting samples from the aquifer that show a slow and steady increase of chemical toxins in the water.

Water hadn’t really been a political priority for Doherty — he’s a Republican, and he focused mostly on economic development and transportation projects — until a couple of years into his second term, when the uptick of stories he heard about young women enduring miscarriages and middle-aged men with organ failure started making him uneasy. Scientists believe that excess consumption of even a small amount of nitrates can do significant harm to the human body; they can cause debilitating conditions in newborns and have been linked to increased risks of cancer. Doherty wasn’t familiar with the research at the time, but he wondered if there was a connection between the contamination in the water and those conversations he kept having.

In June 2022, he decided to do something about it. He went out and collected tap water samples from six homes he chose at random and sent them to a nearby laboratory. The lab called a few days later and explained that it was their policy to notify anyone with a sample that tested above the federal limit for the presence of nitrates in drinking water — 10 parts per million.

Doherty asked which family was going to receive the bad news about their water. But the lab tech corrected him. It wasn’t one of the homes he visited that had a toxic well. It was all six. Doherty says he picked up 70 more test kits and went back out a week later, this time knocking on doors across a wider swath of the county. The results were equally bleak. Of the 70 wells he tested, 68 violated the safety threshold, with an average concentration of nitrates close to four times the federal limit. [Continue reading…]