Is it really that expensive to not do stuff like this?

I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor into the cost analysis.

This is one of the data centres that went to the extra expense of building a closed loop cooling system that would, supposedly, not waste water on a continuous basis. Apparently, even these are not so clean to set up. Governments are going to need to start paying more attention to the commissioning process apparently.

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"Meta said that it's supporting its general contractor, Fortis, which stopped discharging and began hauling wastewater offsite"

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Governments should also watch where this wastewater is being hauled to, and likely just dumped.

Testing for an extremely rare bacterium is not the bare minimum. In fact even the water treatment plants rarely do it. They admit in the article we don’t even know whether or not the bacteria originated from the water supplied by the city that entered the pipes in the first place.

DCs should be responsible for their output but this seems to be a super edge case.

Yeah, unfortunately.

Effluent and wastewater companies have been getting greedy. If one suddenly 100x's your cost, you're fucked until you build onsite treatment or find a way to ship it out.

Is this a common problem? I would assume not, since it lead to a suspense, and that is probably very expensive and something you aim to avoid.

Not do what? Not discharge the water with bacterium? But the data center claims that their independent testing shows that they didn’t even discharge the bacterium. It seems that neither the city nor Meta knew where the bacterium came from.

By definition, externalizing a cost is less expensive than internalizing it; the only recourse for the rest of us is forcing them to properly internalize their costs.

Move fast and break things isn't a mantra that arose from first principles, it's literally all they know how to do