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In 2014, a bottled water company drew down its well near a stretch of family land in Covington and Clifton townships, and a moss bog called Round Swamp went dry. Wendy Bolognesi, whose family has owned the property since the early 1900s, remembers exactly what that looked like.
The swamp is saturated again now. A spring still bubbles up through the sand, and Bolognesi's relatives fill canteen cups and drink from it straight out of the ground. It is a working water system, not a scenic one — and it is about to sit beside a data center campus for the second time in its history that something drew hard enough on the aquifer to empty it.
Thirteen Owners, 772 Acres, Three Sides
The land belongs to the Barton Brothers Partnership, thirteen family members holding 772 acres that have stayed in the family for more than a century. Part of the property carries a conservation easement through the Pocono Heritage Land Trust. Proposed data center sites now border it on three sides across both townships. The trust's executive director, Louise Troutman, didn't mince her description of what a build-out beside the property would mean for the surrounding area.
The proposal itself, from a developer operating as 1778 Rich Pike LLC, describes more than thirty buildings across roughly a thousand acres, some rising up to 120 feet, with water storage structures reaching 200 feet. At a Covington Township planning workshop, the developer's own attorney confirmed the plan directly: each building would draw from its own well into the groundwater, with treated wastewater from the sewer plant used to cool the equipment. Thirty-plus separate straws into the same aquifer that failed once already, from a single bottled-water well a fraction of that scale.
What the Rejected Settlement Reveals
The fight over Clifton Township's zoning has run since April 2025, when the developer filed a validity challenge before the township had any ordinance governing data centers at all. What followed was a sequence of hearings, a proposed settlement, and a 2–1 vote by supervisors to reject it in August. The settlement's own terms are worth reading closely, because they amount to the industry's own list of what it considers necessary to make a project like this survivable next to people: no centralized well-based water system for cooling, only private wells for drinking; sewage and wastewater disposal required to happen entirely outside Clifton Township; buildings held 400 feet back from occupied homes. Residents rejected the settlement anyway. In August 2026, a Lackawanna County judge went further and voided Clifton's existing data center ordinance outright — meaning, as the township's own solicitor put it, it never became law in the first place.
The wastewater provision is worth sitting with on its own. Even the developer's negotiated concession didn't propose treating the campus's own waste in the community hosting it — it proposed sending it somewhere else. Covington Township's chair, Melissa Kearney, later said in a letter to the Clifton supervisors that her own township hadn't been told a related settlement would site the data center's nonpublic well water sources inside Covington's borders specifically. Two adjoining townships, each finding out after the fact that a piece of the water burden had been assigned to the other.
Miles Away, Same Mechanism
The version of this story that doesn't require a data center to sit next door is happening in Freeport Township, Allegheny County, more than a hundred miles from Archbald. A 2022 drilling-fluid leak from a natural gas well there contaminated a resident's water supply with methane, arsenic, and barium. The company operating that well supplies gas to the Homer City power plant — built to serve the same statewide data center demand this series has been tracing since Post I. The contamination didn't happen near a data center. It happened near the gas well feeding the plant that keeps a data center running somewhere else entirely. The harm and the infrastructure it's attached to don't have to share a zip code.
Amazon's own Salem Township site, the flagship of the twenty-billion-dollar announcement in Post I, is projected on its own to draw as much power as roughly 900,000 homes and consume millions of gallons of water a day for cooling. No single township's zoning board reviews that number against what every other proposed campus in the region is asking for at the same time. The Susquehanna River Basin Commission manages the watershed at a scale that spans Pennsylvania, New York, and Maryland — but a commission built to referee an entire basin is not the same thing as a body positioned to catch what happens when a dozen unrelated municipalities each approve one project without knowing what their neighbors just approved. The Delaware Riverkeeper's office has raised exactly this concern on the other side of the state: dozens of proposed campuses, each permitted to draw millions of gallons independently, with no one entity adding up the total draw on the river basin underneath them.
Pamela Barton Robinson, one of the thirteen family owners, made a narrower version of the same argument at a Clifton Township hearing: she asked that any project drawing as little as 50,000 gallons a day trigger river basin commission review, rather than the 100,000-gallon threshold the township's own pending ordinance had proposed. She was asking, in effect, for the regional watchdog to be brought in sooner than the local rule currently requires — a resident doing the coordination work no state or regional body has yet built a mechanism to do on its own.
The swamp on the Barton property is full again. Whether it stays that way depends on math nobody with the authority to run it has been asked to run.
Sources: WVIA News, "Data Centers: Deal or Dilemma" series (Kat Bolus); Lackawanna County township records and hearing coverage; Fox56; Pocono Heritage Land Trust; Delaware Riverkeeper Network; Susquehanna River Basin Commission.
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