NC community worries data centers would drain local water supply

A proposed Amazon data center campus threatens to worsen water issues in a small North Carolina community.

The company announced plans to build the campus on nearly 800 acres of land in Richmond County, 80 miles east of Charlotte. More than $10 billion will be invested in the project and it is expected to create more than 500 jobs over the next five years. The centers will consume large amounts of local water to operate and members of the community are pushing back.

William Ingram, a farmer in Richmond County and cofounder of the Richmond County Coalition for Justice and Black Empowerment, explained the community already has water problems, with some wells running dry and quality issues leading many in the community to buy bottled water rather than use tap water.

“Now, with the coming data center here in Richmond County, we have an even bigger issue,” Ingram asserted. “The issue is that it’s the amount of water that it will consume a day with our already pressing water issue here.”

The Amazon campus will be located near a Duke Energy-operated natural gas plant. The Richmond County Board of Commissioners approved economic incentives for the community as part of the deal for the data centers’ construction.

Ingram noted Richmond County already knows the cost of industries moving into the area. In 1991, a fire broke out at a chicken processing plant in the town of Hamlet and killed 25 people. The deaths were due in part to the plant’s poor safety measures and the plant’s owner was found guilty of 25 counts of involuntary manslaughter because of the incident. Ingram pointed out it woke the community up.

His organization has partnered with groups like the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, Clean Water for North Carolina and Black Workers for Justice to monitor the Amazon project. He added community members are creating their own assessment.

“A lot of our local communities or townships here, the residents in it, they’re volunteering for that testing,” Ingram observed. “That’s a great avenue that we’re going, but these are things that we have to be consistent at in order to make sure that we have the quality health that we need here in Richmond County.”

Ingram emphasized many of the people in the region are Black and indigenous.

“If anybody’s going to fight for your land and air and water, it’s got to be us,” Ingram contended. “It’s got to be the residents, the people that live here, the people who came and descended from its original farmers, the only people who’ve ever lived here.”

Related: Duke Energy asks the EPA to let it release more emissions