AI Summary
5 min readIn 2014, Sandy Wynn Stelt’s husband Joel went in for what they thought was a hernia repair. He came out with a diagnosis of stage four liver cancer and died three weeks later. The following year, state officials in hazmat suits arrived at her home in Belmont, Michigan, to test her well water. The results showed extraordinarily high levels of PFOS—chemicals linked to liver disease, thyroid cancer, and immune system damage. The contamination came from a 60-acre Christmas tree farm across the street, which was actually property owned by Wolverine Worldwide, a company that had dumped tannery waste there for decades. Sandy’s own blood later tested with PFAS levels higher than those found in 3M factory workers. She developed thyroid cancer in 2021. Her story is not an outlier. It is the lived reality for communities across the country who are discovering that the water coming out of their taps has been poisoned, often with little recourse or accountability.
The hidden cost of data centers
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What you'll learn
- 1 (03:09) **Episode Introduction: Water as the New Frontline** - Host Luke Radel frames the episode around water pollution as a community-level crisis, linking it to Trump-era rollbacks of water protections and the rise of data centers.
- 2 (05:46) **Sandy Wynn Stelt: A Life Lost to PFAS in Michigan** - Sandy, a Belmont, MI resident, describes how she learned her well water was poisoned by tannery waste from Wolverine Worldwide, years after her husband died of liver cancer.
- 3 (10:31) **The Human Toll: Community Health and Corporate Accountability** - Sandy details the broader health crisis in her neighborhood and explains why her community was “lucky” compared to others.
- 4 (13:39) **Cynthia’s Fight: Amazon Data Centers Invade Rural Indiana** - Cynthia, an Indiana resident, describes how Amazon is building data centers on a coal plant site that has already contaminated local drinking water with arsenic and boron.
- 5 (18:17) **The Coal Plant That Won’t Die: Trump’s Emergency Order** - Cynthia explains how President Trump intervened to keep a non-operational coal plant online to power the data center, at massive cost to the community.
- 6 (20:48) **Senator Ed Markey: A Childhood Shaped by a Poisoned River** - Senator Markey opens by describing growing up in Malden, MA, where the Malden River was an “environmental sacrifice ward” turned black by industrial dumping.
- 7 (24:24) **Massachusetts vs. EPA: The Cape Cod Case That Changed Climate Law** - Markey traces the landmark 2007 Supreme Court case back to the threat of rising seas on Massachusetts’ coastline.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
The fight for clean water has never been more daunting.
Many Americans live in places where polluters have wreaked havoc on the water systems surrounding them. Some don’t even know they are living in harm’s way.
And in the current political environment, our water is even more vulnerable. The Trump administration has weakened pollution rules for power plants and made it easier for bad actors to dump coal ash. They’ve removed protections for wetland areas and made it tougher for local communities to block pipelines.
On top of all that, the acceleration of data center construction around the country poses even greater risks for local communities.
Luke talked to two people who live in places feeling those harms. He also talked to a lawmaker who has made fighting for clean water, the environment, and his authorship of the Green New Deal, his calling card: U.S. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.).
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