Cheyenne Cuts Off Data Center Flush After Park Irrigation Scare

Cheyenne’s utility board traced 801,475 gallons of construction wastewater from Meta’s AI campus to a rare bacterium that shut down park irrigation for two months. The organism never reached drinking water. Officials then barred every data center on city sewers from dumping fill-and-flush and closed-loop cooling water.

Goat Systems LLC, the Meta entity behind Cheyenne Data Center CHY 1-2 in the High Plains Business Park, received the violation. Fortis Construction held the temporary discharge permit. The campus, announced in 2024 as an $800 million, 715,000-square-foot build for AI work, is still going up and is slated to come online in 2027.

A Bacterium the Treatment Plants Could Not Kill

In late February 2026, Board of Public Utilities lab staff spotted an unusual colony on fecal coliform plates from the wastewater plants. The Wyoming Public Health Laboratory sequenced it as Cupriavidus gilardii, a soil and groundwater organism known for chewing through metals. It was not on the additive list Goat Systems had filed for the cooling-loop flush, and BOPU staff noted it can speed corrosion in metal pipe.

Fill-and-flush is the commissioning step that runs purified water through new cooling pipe to knock out debris, flux, and scale before the loop is sealed and filled with coolant. That used water went into Cheyenne’s sanitary sewer under a temporary authorization issued on October 2, 2025. Sampling required by that authorization stayed inside limits for the chemicals that had been disclosed. The bacterium was the part nobody had listed.

Crow Creek and Dry Creek, the city’s two water reclamation plants, could not strip it out of the stream. Pass-through and interference followed, including in the recycled-water loop that feeds parks and golf courses. Frank Strong IV, BOPU’s engineering and water resources manager, said the worry was not a tap.

The concern we have with our reuse system is we put it into aerosol, where we spray it onto the grass, and that increases the potential for health issues.

Frank Strong IV, Engineering and Water Resources Manager, Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities

Clinical papers still treat C. gilardii as a low-virulence opportunist. A 2016 BMC Infectious Diseases report described a pacemaker infection in a 90-year-old woman who was not obviously immunocompromised, after earlier cases in people with leukemia, aplastic anemia, or a transplant. BOPU’s own June notice said infections are extremely rare and that the organism may pose a risk to elderly and immunocompromised people through direct exposure. The board said it knows of no confirmed illness from this discharge.

Prairie View Golf Course Took Two Days of Spray

Reuse water in Cheyenne is not drinking water. It is treated wastewater sent to grass. After seasonal startup, that loop came down, and crews spent two months on cleanup. Irrigation that had been on reclaimed water was switched to potable supplies so the organism would not travel farther through the reuse mains.

Prairie View Pond, the holding pond on that network, was drained and disinfected. Most of the pond water went back through Dry Creek; the rest was disinfected on site, and BOPU said no soil was hauled away. Staff also cleaned several miles of sewer mains.

Public exposure, as the board later reconstructed it, was narrow. Contaminated reuse ran for two days at Prairie View Golf Course. In talks with the course, BOPU said no members of the public were on the grounds during those irrigation windows. Drinking-water wells and taps were never in the path.

On April 3, with city reservoirs low, staff turned the reuse system back on at 9:30 a.m. to save potable water, pumping from Crow Creek into Prairie View Pond. They called that a mistake in their own timeline and killed the pumps at 1:17 p.m. the same day. No water from that burst went through irrigation pumps, the board wrote.

801,475 Gallons Went Down the Sewer

BOPU later put a number on the construction discharge and a calendar on its own response. The volume covers January through March, the window of the temporary authorization, not a single spill.

THE DISCHARGE CALENDAR

1. Late February 2026: Lab staff flag an unusual bacterium in routine wastewater samples.
2. February 24, 2026: The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality is notified. The organism is not a regulated contaminant.
3. March 22, 2026: Pumps at Crow Creek are shut down.
4. March 24, 2026: Fill-and-flush discharge privileges are revoked and the contractor is told to stop.
5. March 25, 2026: The BOPU board, Mayor Patrick Collins, and Chief of Staff Amber Ash are told the source and the cutoff.
6. April 3, 2026: Reuse is restarted in the morning, then stopped at 1:17 p.m.
7. June 29, 2026: Reclaimed irrigation resumes after talks with Laramie County Public Health.
8. July 2, 2026: Goat Systems is named in a significant noncompliance notice and assessed a $10,000 fine.
9. July 13, 2026: Goat Systems files an appeal and asks for a contested hearing.

The effluent that left the plants during the episode still carried the organism into Crow Creek. That reach is class 2C water, not a drinking source and not managed for game fish. Both plants passed whole-effluent toxicity tests in both quarters, BOPU said, a check on whether the mixed discharge is toxic to aquatic life.

Cheyenne Now Makes Every Campus Haul That Water

The enforcement step that lasts is not the ticket. It is a citywide pause on the kind of water a data-center cooling loop produces when it is being built or bled. BOPU said the freeze is precautionary, to give staff time to study how to sample these discharges before another one lands in the plants.

WHAT THE CITY WILL AND WILL NOT TAKE

Goat Systems may still send ordinary building wastewater and evaporative blowdown into the sewer. Fill-and-flush and closed-loop water have to be trucked to specialized plants, and BOPU has asked for hauling manifests. Since March, only one other closed-loop cooling system has been under construction in the city, and its request to discharge was denied. Microsoft sites in Cheyenne were sampled in late March and came back negative.

Before the Meta campus was poured, BOPU had already required the closed-loop wastewater piping to be physically disconnected from the public sewer, a guard against glycol leaks. Temporary fill-and-flush dumping was the exception, granted on the additive list. That exception is now closed for the whole class.

THE NEW HAUL-OFF RULES

• Citywide freeze: Fill-and-flush and closed-loop cooling wastewater stay off Cheyenne sewers until further notice.
• Haul, do not dump: New data center jobs must take that water to industrial treatment plants.
• Name does not matter: Eligibility follows wastewater quality, not the LLC on the door.
• Domestic stays on: Sinks, toilets, and evaporative blowdown can still enter the sewer.
• Reuse is back: Park and golf irrigation resumed June 29, 2026, with extra sampling.

Erin Lamb, BOPU’s administrative and public affairs coordinator, said the Meta site’s fill-and-flush privilege is permanently terminated. The wider freeze is written as until further notice. BOPU does not expect a new ordinance yet and still runs the industrial pretreatment program under EPA oversight and Cheyenne City Code Chapter 13.20.

Goat Systems, Fortis, and a $10,000 Fine

On July 2, 2026, the board issued a Notice of Significant Noncompliance to Goat Systems for pass-through and interference at both plants and the reuse system. The administrative fine is $10,000. A surcharge to recover investigation and treatment costs is still unpriced. Goat Systems appealed on July 13. After that filing, BOPU said it would not add comment until the appeal ends.

The appeal’s first claim is identity. Goat Systems says the notice improperly named Goat Systems as the responsible party because Fortis, not Goat, held the October 2, 2025, temporary authorization to discharge boiler condensate and fill-and-flush drainage. BOPU’s own FAQ agrees the temp permit ran through Goat’s sewer connection and was issued to Fortis. The verbal cease-discharge call on March 24 and the written revocation went to Fortis, the appeal says. Meta, in a written statement, called that a permit-holder question, not a charge that anyone acted badly.

The second claim is proof. Goat Systems says BOPU has not produced the sampling data, lab reports, and chain-of-custody files that would pin the organism on CHY 1-2, and that Fortis samples taken at the same time were negative. Meta said that when the board flagged a substance in wastewater, not drinking water, Fortis stopped the dump and began hauling offsite, and that independent testing, including at least one run done with BOPU, found no bacteria. BOPU’s FAQ is blunter on origin: staff do not know how the organism got into the datacenter discharge, only that they found it in that discharge before it entered the city sewer.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The volume: 801,475 gallons of construction wastewater left the site in January, February, and March.
• The plants: Crow Creek and Dry Creek could not remove the organism, and reuse production stopped.
• The cutoff: Fill-and-flush privileges ended March 24, 2026, and the citywide cooling-water freeze followed.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The pathway in: How C. gilardii entered the cooling-loop flush water is not established.
• The named user: Whether Goat Systems or Fortis is the proper industrial user is on appeal.
• The bill: The surcharge for cleanup and investigation has not been set, and no hearing result has been posted.

A $10,000 ticket on an $800 million campus is a small line. The cost that actually moved is the two-month loss of reuse water, the potable water burned on parks and fairways, the miles of main that had to be cleaned, and a standing rule that the next cooling loop in Cheyenne does not get a sewer tap for its flush. BOPU said it does not believe the discharge was malicious. In the last 10 years the board has issued six significant noncompliance notices; this is the first time it has found this organism in the system.

Why Cheyenne Waited Until June to Tell Residents

BOPU named no company in its first public notice, which went out June 26, 2026, after the reuse system was already down and the March cutoff was already three months old. The June 26 release described an industrial user, the organism, and the cleanup, then said reuse irrigation would restart on June 29. The board’s later explanation was blunt: it judged a low risk to public health, and it did not want a notice that could produce public panic. Standard practice, it added, is to withhold a customer’s name until a formal enforcement action is issued. That action landed July 2.

Wyoming DEQ had been told on February 24. County public health was looped in on June 18, ahead of the reuse restart. Cheyenne LEADS, the economic-development group, was not notified because it is not a regulator. Collins later called the episode regrettable and said he thought BOPU had moved quickly, with no danger to the public. U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, in a July letter to Mark Zuckerberg, asked why Wyoming residents heard on June 26, and heard the Meta site named on July 2, when discharge privileges had already been pulled on March 24.

Online, the episode was often flattened into a story about deadly bacteria in the town water. The utility record is narrower and, for a host city, harder: a construction flush that biological treatment did not catch, a reuse loop that sprays parks, and a sewer code that had treated fill-and-flush as ordinary industrial water.

Meta Promised a Light Draw on City Water

When Meta unveiled the Cheyenne campus in 2024, the water pitch was the point of the local deal. Collins said the company had agreed not to use more water than a typical business with 100 employees. The design uses closed-loop cooling, the same family of system sold across the industry as a way off evaporative towers. The 2024 announcement also promised about 100 permanent jobs and more than 1,000 skilled-trade jobs at the peak of construction.

Closed-loop still makes wastewater. It makes it when the pipe is born. Cheyenne learned that the commissioning flush, not the running coolant, was the stream its plants could not handle, and that a metal-tolerant environmental bacterium does not need to be a regulated pollutant to take reuse irrigation offline. After draining and disinfecting the entire reuse water system and Prairie View Pond, the board put signs up where reuse runs and turned the sprinklers back on June 29.

Goat Systems still sits on city sewer for toilets and blowdown. The cooling-loop dump does not. Until BOPU says otherwise, every data center that wants to flush a closed loop in Cheyenne will load a truck. The appeal will decide who pays the $10,000 and the surcharge. The haul-off rule is already the price of putting a campus on this sewer.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on a municipal utility action and an administrative appeal. It is informational only and is not medical advice, environmental-health advice, or legal advice. It does not tell anyone whether park or golf-course irrigation is safe to contact, whether a given discharge violated the law, or how a pending appeal should be decided. Readers with health questions about opportunistic bacteria should speak with a licensed physician; parties with a legal interest in the Cheyenne notice should consult a qualified attorney. Figures, names, and case status reflect the Board of Public Utilities notices, FAQ, and appeal papers described here and may change if the hearing record is supplemented or a later order is issued.