‘I wouldn’t want it anywhere’: Officials trace rare bacteria back to Meta data center construction

Officials are sounding the alarm over a Meta data center under construction in Wyoming after a local public utilities agency reported that it traced a rare bacteria in its water treatment facility back to the site.

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The Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities discovered the contamination of Cupriavidus gilardii during a routine sampling of its reclaimed water irrigation system in February. After months of testing, officials determined that the source was Fortis Construction, a Meta contractor tasked with building a 715,000-square-foot data center known as “” in southeast Wyoming outside the state’s capital. 

According to the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, which first reported the contamination, the local utilities board permanently revoked Meta’s ability to discharge its construction wastewater into its system and adopted new policies that ban wastewater discharge from certain types of data centers. 

Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan told SFGATE on Tuesday that Fortis stopped discharging wastewater after being notified of the contamination and that it found no trace of the bacteria after it began its own independent water testing. Brennan added that the contamination did not affect Cheyenne’s drinking water, which city officials also told to other media outlets. 

“Meta is committed to being a good neighbor in Cheyenne, including through the protection of local water resources, and will continue encouraging collaboration between Fortis and the board until this situation is resolved,” Brennan said in an email. 

Cupriavidus gilardii is a naturally occurring bacteria found in soil and groundwater. If individuals contract the bacteria, it can cause severe lung and blood infections, and it can lead to sepsis in some cases, according to Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at UC San Francisco. 

Infection is extremely rare — a March report in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases called the bacteria an “opportunistic pathogen,” meaning it’s mostly a risk for immunocompromised individuals. The journal stated only seven known infections to date, including four fatal cases. One fatal case in 2010 involved a 12-year-old girl from the U.S. with a rare bone marrow condition, who died after contracting the bacteria while vacationing in Europe.

The affected water reclamation program cleans wastewater to be reused for public irrigation, specifically for watering public green spaces, and does not process drinking water, the Tribune Eagle reported. However, Gandhi told SFGATE in an interview that it doesn’t mean there wasn’t a potential risk to public health. 

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This type of bacteria can infect people when they breath aerosols, or small droplets of water, carrying the germ, Gandhi said. A public utilities official told the Tribune Eagle that this was exactly what they were concerned about, since they sprayed the water on Cheyenne’s green spaces.

“I would not want it around my drinking water,” Gandhi said. “I wouldn’t want it anywhere.”

The Board of Public Utilities noted in a June 26 news release that it temporarily shut down the program just after its seasonal start-up and took two months to drain and disinfect the entire reuse network. The utilities board also said that only “minimal residual traces” of the bacteria were recently detected in its facilities and that, following consultation with Laramie County’s public health department, it would resume irrigation services on June 29.

Though the Project Cosmo data center is not yet operational, the recent contamination adds another stroke of fear for communities already wary about how this tech infrastructure might strain already limited water and energy resources. A spokesperson for the utilities board told the Guardian that it would hold a press conference soon to address the situation. 

Work at Meta and want to talk? Contact tech reporter Matthew Brown securely at [email protected] or on Signal at matthewbrownsfgate.11.