Amazon, AWS, in New Carlisle, recently received permission to drain 31.2 million gallons of water per day using the Niespodziany Ditch as a spillway.
We typically measure water in acre-feet. This measurement is the amount of water required to cover one acre of land to a depth of one foot. Thus, 31,200,000 gallons of water is roughly 96 acre-feet. A good calculator for this can be found here from Western-Water.com.
To put that in perspective, if the upper bowl at Notre Dame Stadium is 137 feet above the ground and the circumference is a bit more than ½ mile, and accounting for the sloped walls, the bowl itself, if watertight, would hold about 12 million cubic feet of water or about 275 acre-feet of water. This means that every three days, you could overfill Notre Dame’s football stadium with water.
More significantly, think of the beloved Diamond Lake in nearby Cassopolis, Michigan. This lake contains roughly 17,133 acre-feet of water in an average year. This would be approximately 5.6 billion gallons. If Amazon is pumping 31,200,000 gallons of water per day, that is 11,388,000,000 (more than 11 billion) gallons of water per year, meaning the lake could be drained more than twice annually in terms of water usage and still not equal the amount of water being pumped away from the AWS plant in New Carlisle.
Sometimes large numbers are hard to consider, and while these two extreme examples are meant to help us understand the amount of water we’re discussing in terms of pumping in our county and region, the amount can also be quantified in other ways.
The city of South Bend (and its surrounding areas) uses only 11.3 million gallons of drinking water per day. The amount of water pumped away from the AWS plant this year would, if treated, be enough to supply the South Bend area for more than 2.5 years.
What will all of this pumping of water in the region do to aquifers, inland lakes, and individual wells? We don’t know. In the rush to garner contracts, appropriate studies never occurred. Anyone who says otherwise is lying, because if the studies were done, Amazon would have known that its project was on the second-largest marshland in the United States, the Kankakee. These wetlands are second in size in the United States, only to the Florida Everglades. If this water abatement was not part of the original understanding of the project for construction purposes, then we are left only to imagine what environmental problems and long-term impacts were also left unstudied.
Placing a dollar value on water is a tricky endeavor, but our cities do it all of the time. However, agricultural water in our region costs about $50-$100 per acre-foot, so this pumped water has a value of about $2 million per year, should Hoosiers want to use it for these purposes. Surprisingly, Amazon is not trying to spin the story as a corporate entity; they are freeing the water and making it available to farmers for free, although the battle isn’t yet over, and this kind of political spin could yet still come.
The AWS plant, located almost directly on the North-South Continental Divide, is also gravely concerning. Pumping water on a divide has already shown deleterious effects elsewhere in the United States and around the planet.
Citizens still have avenues for redress in these issues. In Festus, Missouri, last month, citizens ousted four incumbent council members who supported a data center and were seeking reelection. In suburban Milwaukee, citizens of Port Washington, Wisconsin, passed a referendum restricting future data center projects. Additionally, as citizens, for the moment, we control the roads, the power supply, and more for these regions, and we still have time to act as regulators of these data centers, but the action must come quickly and not be done through ‘agreements’ but through legal contracts. Our nation has an immediate and urgent need for forward-thinking legal arrangements with Amazon and others building data centers before they garner even more economic and political support.
Any political malfeasance you suspect from either party in Washington, D.C., is not the story. The story is right here in New Carlisle, Indiana, as well as in other areas, where we are being pressured into hurried growth for data centers that provide very little economic growth in the regions but could take the ultimate toll on our environment and thus our true livelihoods.
The author wishes to thank Professors Mark Fiege, Janet Ore, and Dan Tyler, all formerly of Colorado State University, for teaching him about the value of water and how to think of it as an important shared resource. The author also wishes to acknowledge and thank the Handy Ditch and Irrigation Company (Weld and Larimer Counties) for allowing him to study and work alongside them in the late 1990s to understand the role of irrigation and the diverse perspectives on water use. Without the lessons from those professors and the Handy Ditch company, his understanding and thinking about water and community would be very different.
© 2026 Brian S Collier. All opinions are those of the author. The author reserves all Rights and copyrights. To request permission to reprint any or all of this article, contact info@redresssouthbend.com.
Reprinted with permission of the author by Redress South Bend.
All opinions and views in this piece are attributed to the author and are not necessarily the thoughts or opinions of Redress South Bend.
