The Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities has stopped accepting industrial wastewater from data center fill-and-flush and closed-loop cooling operations after tracing a rare bacterium in the city's reclaimed water to Goat Systems LLC, the entity Meta uses to build its Cheyenne campus. In a notice reported by Cowboy State Daily, the Board said Goat Systems was in significant noncompliance for discharging water carrying Cupriavidus gilardii, a metal-resistant bacterium that interfered with two water reclamation plants and pushed the reuse system offline for months of cleanup. The Board revoked the contractor's fill-and-flush discharge privileges on March 24, and a wider suspension now covers every data center connected to city services.
Fill-and-flush is a commissioning step in which crews fill a cooling loop's piping with water, flush it to clear debris before the system is run, and then send the used water to drain. Goat Systems routed that flush water, which contained Cupriavidus gilardii, into Cheyenne's sanitary sewer, Frank Strong, the Board's engineering and water resource division manager, told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. Strong said the fill water had been purchased from the Board itself and that the origin of the bacterium remains unknown, but said that lab staff caught it in February during routine fecal-bacteria sampling. "This isn't something we normally test for," Strong told the paper.
