In 2022, officials in Oregon’s Morrow County declared a state of emergency. The announcement was not in response to a sudden event like a wildfire, earthquake, or flood. Yet it was something just as grave: Their water was dangerously polluted. 

For three decades, agricultural and industrial runoff has contaminated groundwater in the Lower Umatilla Basin of the state. Last summer, canvassers for the Oregon Health Authority went door to door, testing residents’ well water to see just how bad the situation had become.

“Right off the bat, it was pretty clear that the problem was really severe,” says Kaleb Lay, community organizer at Oregon Rural Action. Forty percent of the wells tested showed concentrations of nitrates above the level deemed safe by the US EPA. The link between high nitrate levels and several diseases is well-established; some newer studies suggest that even very low nitrate levels may heighten the risk of certain cancers. “You can’t throw a rock in the city of Boardman without finding someone who has cancer or a miscarriage,” says Lay. “The trick is there's no straightforward test a doctor can use to connect an individual's health condition to nitrates." 

fter years of giving out bottled water and filters to Lower Umatilla Basin residents affected by the region’s nitrate crisis, authorities are starting to look into ways they can connect those residents with clean sources of drinking water.

Whether this issue will be first resolved by local government or the federal court system is an open question.

Commissioners from Umatilla and Morrow counties held a joint meeting in Hermiston Wednesday to discuss plans to find alternatives to drawing water from private wells, which are more vulnerable to nitrate contamination.

More than three decades into a nitrate pollution crisis, a handful of Lower Umatilla Basin residents are escalating their concerns to the courts.

Five residents living in the Boardman, Oregon, area — Mike Pearson, Michael and Virginia Brandt, and James Patrick Suter and Silvia Suter — filed a class action lawsuit in federal court Tuesday against some of Morrow County’s largest agricultural industries, which are the main contributors to nitrates in the area’s groundwater. The defendants are Threemile Canyon Farms, Lamb Weston, Madison Ranches, Beef Northwest Feeders and the Port of Morrow.

The lawsuit aims not only to secure compensation from the companies the residents hold responsible, but also to get them to foot the costs of cleaning up the groundwater and connecting residents with clean drinking water.

Many of the plaintiffs are mainstays of the tours and community meetings that sprouted up following Morrow County’s emergency declaration in 2022. Those meetings included visits from U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek and other high-ranking state and federal officials. For many residents, the increased publicity did not result in clean drinking water.

“The Port (of Morrow) and these commercial farms have placed us and hundreds of other families in an impossible position,” Pearson said in a statement. “We can’t keep living like this.”

The plaintiffs’ legal team is being led by Seattle attorney Steve Berman, a well-known attorney who helped bring cases against Big Tobacco in the 90s. In an interview, he compared nitrate pollution in the Lower Umatilla Basin to the drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan, where thousands of people were exposed to lead and other contaminants through the municipal water system.

“People couldn’t get access to drinking water and I think everyone was amazed,” he said. “Well, here it is, right here in our backyard.”