Fed up with slow fix, Oregon residents sue businesses over nitrate pollution

By Antonio Sierra (OPB), Feb. 28, 2024

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.”