“I would like to see Texas become the center of the universe for bitcoin and crypto,” US Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in 2021. In 2024, Republican Governor Greg Abbott said Texas “wears the crown as the bitcoin mining capital of the world.” But in small towns like Granbury, TX, about an hour southwest of Fort Worth, residents are the ones paying the price for Texas’ crypto boom. Granbury’s 300-megawatt bitcoin mine, which is owned by Marathon Digital, a Florida-based cryptocurrency company, uses a mix of liquid immersion and industrial fans to prevent over 20,000 computers from overheating. Many residents say that it’s the constant sound from those fans that has made life increasingly unbearable in their small town—and that their concerns are going ignored by the company and government officials. In this episode of Working People, we speak with four residents of Granbury living near the Marathon bitcoin mine: Danny Lakey, Karen Pearson, Nick Browning, and Virginia Browning.
Additional links/info:
- Protect Hood County website
- Andrew R. Chow, TIME, “‘We’re living in a nightmare:’ Inside the health crisis of a Texas bitcoin town”
- Andrew R. Chow, TIME, “Noisy neighbor: Bitcoin’s hidden health cost” (Video Report)
- Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “TRNN wins 2025 Izzy Award for coverage of East Palestine, OH, trainwreck & chemical disaster”
- Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘I had to move away from everything that I ever had’: Chemically exposed residents of East Palestine, OH, and Conyers, GA, have been left behind”
- Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “‘This is murder!’: Industrially poisoned South Baltimore residents march on state capitol, demand help from Gov. Moore”
- Maximillian Alvarez, Steve Mellon, & Mike Balonek, The Real News Network, “Trainwreck in ‘Trump Country’: Partisan politics hasn’t helped East Palestine, OH (DOCUMENTARY)”
- Keaton Peters, Inside Climate News, “Texas leaders worry that bitcoin mines threaten to crash the state power grid”
- NBC News, “Inside the Texas bitcoin mine reportedly making residents sick”
- James Pollard, The Texas Tribune, “Texas Republicans want to make the state the center of the cryptocurrency universe”
Permanent links below…
Featured Music…
- Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song
Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are beginning a new investigation in our ongoing series where we speak with working class people, living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s sacrifice zones. As you know from listening to the voices and stories in this series, sacrifice zones are areas where people have been left to live in conditions that harm and even threaten life itself in sacrifice zones as ghoulish of a term as that is. They can look a lot of different ways and the sources of toxic pollution or environmental devastation don’t all look the same either.
It can look like the mushroom cloud that exploded from the derailed Norfolk southern bomb train in the sleepy rust belt town of East Palestinian, Ohio. It can look like the black coal dust covering the windows and porches and the wheezing lungs of urban residents like here in South Baltimore. It can also sound different and as we’ll discuss in today’s episode, sound itself and the entity producing it intense, relentless torturous noise can be the main thing that’s actually hurting people. And that’s what Andrew R. Chow, a technology correspondent for TIME Magazine, found in the town of Granbury, Texas, about an hour southwest of Fort Worth. “On an evening in December, 2023,” Chow writes, “43-year-old small business owners, Sarah Rosenkrantz collapsed in her home in Granbury, Texas, and was rushed to the emergency room. Her heart pounded 200 beats per minute. Her blood pressure spiked into hypertensive crisis.
Her skull throbbed, it felt like my head was in a pressure vice being crushed. She says that pain was worse than childbirth. Rosecrans migraine lasted for five days. Doctors gave her several rounds of IV medication and painkiller shots, but nothing seemed to knock down the pain. She says this was odd, especially because local doctors were similarly vexed when Indigo, Rosecranz’s five-year-old daughter, was taken to urgent care earlier that year, screaming that she felt a ‘red beam behind her eardrums.’ It didn’t occur to Sarah that symptoms could be linked, but in January of 2024, she walked into a town hall in Granbury and found a room full of people worn thin from strange debilitating illnesses. None of them knew what exactly was causing their symptoms, but they all shared a singular grievance. A dull oral hum had crept into their lives, which growled or roared depending on the time of day, rattling their windows and rendering them unable to sleep.
The hum local law enforcement had learned was emanating from a Bitcoin mining facility that had recently moved into the area and was exceeding legal noise ordinances on a daily basis. The development of large scale Bitcoin mines and data centers is quite new and most of them are housed in extremely remote places. There have been no major medical studies on the impacts of living near one, but there’s an increasing body of scientific studies linking prolonged exposure to noise pollution with cardiovascular damage. And one local doctor, ears, nose and throat specialist Celine Baha says he sees patients with symptoms potentially stemming from the Bitcoin mine’s noise on an almost weekly basis. So you guys should definitely read this excellent piece by Andrew Chow in TIME, and you should watch the companion video report, both of which we’ve linked to in the show notes. And I want to thank Brother Andrew for helping me to connect with our guests today who are all residents of Granbury themselves and who have all been affected by the massive 300 megawatt Bitcoin mining operation near their homes.
Now, the mine, which is owned by Marathon Digital, a Florida based cryptocurrency company uses a mix of liquid immersion and industrial fans to prevent the over 20,000 computers from overheating there. And many residents have said that it’s the constant sound from those fans that has made life increasingly unbearable in their small town.
In a statement to NBC News for a report they did 6 months ago on the bitcoin mine, Marathon said what companies always say when I’m investigating stories like these: that they are doing nothing wrong, they’re the best of corporate neighbors, they’re abiding by existing laws, and there’s no proof they’re the ones causing harm to the community. “Since [Marathon] took operational control of the data center in April 2024,” the company said, “we have gone above and beyond what is required in a well-established industrial zone ton ensure our facility is best in industry, including engaging third-party experts to evaluate sound levels and investing millions of dollars to reduce the perceived loudness of the facility. As a result, all levels measured around the facility are well below state and county law sound limits. There is no established link, medical or otherwise, between [Marathon’s] operations and the ailments that are being alleged.”
So with all of that upfront, let’s do what we do best and take you right to the front lines of the struggle and get the story firsthand from the people who are living it. I am so grateful to be joined today by our four guests. Danny Lakey is a resident of Granberry and he joins us today along with Karen Pearson and her parents, Nick and Virginia Browning, all longtime residents of Granbury. Danny, Karen, Nick, Virginia, thank you all so much for joining us today. I really wish we were connecting under better circumstances, but I’m really, really grateful to all of you for joining us and sharing your stories with us. And I wanted to start by just asking if we could go around the table and have y’all tell us a bit more about who you are and what you do and what your life was like before this Bitcoin mine came to your town.
Danny Lakey:
So I’m Danny Lakey. I’m originally from Arlington, which is east of Fort Worth, and it’s about an hour and 10 minutes from where I live now. I am the newest Granbury residence. My wife and I four years ago, sold everything we had, wanted to move out to the country, get someplace where it was quiet and get away from the big city. Little did I know that it would be louder where I live now than where I came from. So in the middle of 8 million people in the DFW metroplex, I had about a third. The noise that I have in an area where I don’t have, I’ve got 30 people within 200 acres. 300 acres. I mean, you can’t imagine what it is I will admit, because they want to say that they’re not violating any state laws. That’s a lie. Texas has a nuisance law that says if somebody does anything that hinders you from using your property as you intended to use it, which in my case was a retirement place for me and my wife to enjoy life, they’ve taken that from us.
That is a violation of state law. So when they say that they’re not in violation of any laws, they’re not, but that’s a civil law. They are not currently in violation of any state laws, but the state laws are, they’re inefficient in Texas, anything under 85 decibels and most cities limited to about 40 decibels. To put it in that perspective, airports are regulated to 65 decibels during the day. If you want to know how high the threshold is for us on the noise violations. And they’ve gotten very, very close and we have readings where they’ve exceeded it, but we’ve not been able to prove it in court so they can say they’re not in violation of criminal law when they say they’re not in violation of state law, they are misleading people.
Nick Browning:
Well, when we came here, that’s kind of what we wanted to do. We sold our place in Santa Fe, Texas right out of Galveston because this was nice and quiet out here. They moved in on top of us. We didn’t move in on them and they moved. That thing is right across the Bitcoin. Mine is right across the street from my property and I’ve had decimals 83 on my front porch and sometime at night I’ve had more than 83 and a vacuum cleaner’s only 55 and who in the world is going to go to sleep with a vacuum cleaner running all night long in their house? And that’s what it’s like. I’ve been in out of the hospital with all kinds of problems. I never had a problem before and they think I’m old, but I’m kind of seasoned. We’re not old. And my wife has been in out of the hospital.
They said it was a brain tumor, but as it turned out it was not a tumor. All the stuff was sent to the University of Michigan and they still don’t know what it is. It’s not a tumor, it’s not cancer. And a month or so after I had her there the first time, we had to go back again and stay another five days. So they are lying. They put a wall up, but that sound goes right over top of that wall. And a sound expert said, if you live right beside that wall, it wouldn’t bother you as bad. Well, we don’t live beside that wall. So they’re trying to get in good with grandberry. They furnished money for the 4th of July fireworks and they furnished money for the parades and this and that. And they give the sheriff department a big barbecue, but they’re trash. They’re not good neighbors at all. And constellation of fire plans is not either
Virginia Browning:
Out here where we are. We’re in the middle of the country. We have wild animals every place and we enjoy every one of them. Even the coyotes we don’t mind because we know where we live, but they have ran away the birds, all the animals, we don’t even have snakes. So you can see how the sound is destroying the environment out here with the little animals. Besides our health, our health is terrible right now, but it is what it is at the moment. We can’t do too much about it. We’re fighting it. Everybody out here is fighting it, but big corporation, they seem to be able to just get their way. And we are left behind in the rubble of everything, but we don’t like it. We came out here, our children lived here. We wanted to be here with our children, our grandchildren and grandchildren, but we don’t get that peace anymore. So it’s miserable. It’s absolutely miserable. And when have to go in and out of the hospital all the time, doctors all the time, that’s an invasion on us too.
Nick Browning:
There’s a big water line that comes from Lake Granbury all the way to constellation power plant. And that steam, they take that water and they make steam to turn those turbines. Well, when they put some of that steam up in the air, it has all kinds of chemical in it. It has lead, mercury, carbon monoxide amidst the acid and everything. Well, some of the water that they send over the top and to go back through their thin fans and stuff, they condense that steam back to water and they have a holding pond. That water goes in that holding pond. And then from there when they get so much, it’s dumped into Brazos River. Well, that brass River comes right around. It comes right back to Lake Granbury again where there’s already been a content of content. They did a sample and there was a lead content in there, but they don’t want that to get out. So eventually, if they keep on doing what they’re doing now, lake Granbury won’t be a good lake at all to fish in. You won’t be able to eat the fish because they’ll have a lead content in it and they’ll have a mercury content in it, but they don’t want nobody to know any of that. They kind of keep all that hush.
Karen Pearson:
So just to dovetail a little bit off of what mom and dad have said, being out here for me and to have to watch what they go through is extremely stressful too. I know that oftentimes at night they don’t sleep. Their bedroom is upstairs, and so that noise just penetrates their bedroom at night. So that makes their days rough. Cognitively, it causes issues, just the stress of every day, day in and day out task when you’re tired and you don’t have sleep and then it’s so fragmented or interrupted throughout many days, it just causes a lot of stress and wear and tear on them emotionally and also in their physical health. Part of what I wanted to do and their last part of their life that they’ll say they’re seasoned and they are. They’re very seasoned and very independent as much as they can be.
But over the last two and a half years, their independence has definitely declined. And so then I come in as some of their being their caregiver for different things. It makes it very difficult to watch what they go through because this is not what they intended for the second part of their life. And I was given a great part in the first part of my life by my parents and part of my goal was to give them the best quality of life. And their second part that’s not happening out here. Like mom said, a lot of the wildlife has gone away. That’s something that they enjoy every day is to feed the birds and the deer and different things out here, take off on the golf cart and go feed. But that’s becoming less and less. So many other things as far as their health dad with respiratory issues kind going back to mom’s, the complications of the brain issue.
It is true there’s not a lot of data, not a lot of research out there. And so they fall back on that. But kind of the odd thing is that while they say we might not can prove that they’re causing this harm, there’s so many people in the area that are having many of the same similar things going on. And here’s my question back is while we might not can prove it, but you can’t prove that it’s not either. And to mom’s issue, that biopsy, I saw a 1.3 centimeter creature in her brain. It was there and they did a brain biopsy and the University of Michigan could not, it wasn’t cancer, thank God it doesn’t have the cell tissue of a tumor. It didn’t have the cell tissue of a mass and then one back in December, that was in July of this last year, December of this year, she had another episode.
And the tumors, that creature, whatever it was, it’s gone. So it’s not there. But now the doctor is saying, but there was seizure activity in her brain. We don’t have seizures in our family and my mom has never had a seizure in her life. And then in our community, we have had a little child that started having just unexpected seizures and they had to move out of the area. So there’s just so many, they’re not coincidences. There’s so many things that are going on around here that is impacting our community and we are trying to stand up and fight again big companies as best we can with what we have.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Danny, Karen, Nick, Virginia. I wanted to go back around the table and ask if you could just tell that story a bit more about how things have unfolded in your lives from the time that you first heard about this Bitcoin mine to now. When did you start sensing that something was deeply wrong here?
Danny Lakey:
Well, I think for me, and probably for most of us, we started hearing some things late 20, 23, November, December, and it was getting louder. It was intermittent and everybody was, we saw what was going up over at the plant. Everybody was debating on, is it batteries? Nobody really knew what it was. And then somebody finally took a picture and said it’s Bitcoin, and then showed another mine from another area of the same type of machine. So then we knew what it was and we started paying a little more direct attention to where the noise was coming from because up until then, we just thought that the electric plant that had never had a noise problem was having these crazy fluctuations and didn’t know what to think about it. It continued to get worse when the Brownings say that they registered 82 on their property or 80, higher than 82 on their property.
The highest I’ve ever gotten is 82. The day it was 82, I was walking in my backyard and I just looked at the plant and I’m like, what in the heck is that? And then I felt like I got punched in the chest for the next two days. I had a heart arrhythmia and I was having some issues with my heart. I worked in the medical field, and so I have doctors that I can call at a whim and I called my PCP and he said no, because my wife was like, he needs to go to the hospital. And my PCP said, you need to. He said, no, I think this is sound related. Basically, judging from my history, I’d only had that once before I got a steroid injection and found out that I’m allergic to steroids. And so an allergic reaction to a steroid caused that heart palpitations.
But when I had my heart checked out, then my heart is in perfect condition. So this was way out of the ordinary and it was completely from the sound. And that day I registered 82 decibels on my property and you could actually feel the ground shake. My wife started having blackouts. She wrecked her car six times in four months, lost her job, wasn’t able to work. She’s still not working, which has been about seven months now just because of all the issues that it’s caused her within her body. The strangest thing for me is on any given day, if you just want to see something funny, just take me to any public place or whatever. Let me sit for about 10 minutes and I’ll fall asleep. And it doesn’t matter if I just woke up or it doesn’t matter what time of the day it is, when it is, I can fall asleep within 10 minutes because I don’t ever sleep.
I used to sleep through the night through trains, dogs, it didn’t matter. Nothing was waking me up and now I’m up two, three times a night. I don’t sleep well at all. It really, you don’t understand what kind of an impact that has on you, the constant barrage of noise. But if you look at work rules from any osha, if you’re exposed to certain amount of noise levels, the louder it is, the shorter time of exposure and the longer time of exposure, the longer you have to be away from it. Well, we exceed all of that on a daily basis 24 7. And unfortunately we can’t get away from it. And because of what’s going on, they’ve plummeted our property value so much I can no longer get from our property what I put in it. And that’s just ridiculous.
Nick Browning:
We noticed it in 2022 and 2023 and right on up till today, I’ve never in my life had any heart trouble and I started having high blood pressure. So I went to her doctor because she has a pacemaker and her doctor told me there wasn’t a thing in the world wrong with my heart, but I take high blood pressure medicine every night that he gave me. And a lot of the doctors around here, they don’t want to get involved in none of this stuff. But it is done a number on us and not only us, all of our neighbors, the same way we got neighbors around here that people you wouldn’t believe that had a heart trouble. And I’ve been in a hospital, I had to go to emergency room one time with my ears, give me a ear infection. I’ve been in a hospital twice for flu. They said flu and pneumonia. So man, it’s been something else. And we’re not the only ones around here. There’s people all around it. Us in this area. And they even had some as a school about three or four miles over from us. And even they’ve had kids in school. It affects their hearings and art and everything else. And it is really done a number on us. They say they’re not doing anything but they’re lying. It is
Karen Pearson:
Like what Danny said, we heard noises just couldn’t identify exactly what it was. And at first too, when you hear something like that and you think it might be the gas plant, that’s a bit alarming too because we weren’t sure if something was about to blow up, take off or what. So then as time continues to progress and if the wind changes, it blows from the south or the different types of nighttime, it’s louder than daytime. There’s so many different factors that cause the noise to ramp up more than others. And really depending on where you’re sitting in reference to the facility too and what portion of the mines that they have going at the time. But once we started realizing that it was actually coming from the mine, we were a bit surprised that they were allowed to even come into the area without us even know what was going on. None of us had been notified publicly that anything was going to take place or they were going to be expanding to a Bitcoin mine company. We had no idea. All of a sudden it’s just upon us
And then we are having to deal with what’s happening. And then at that point, it was more about we started noticing people getting sick, and then we started getting sick in our own homes. And I work from home. So I’m here 24 7 and over the last year and a half, I’ve seen decline in my dad’s hearing. Again, just all these things that have started to come about. And then when you start hearing about your neighbor having some of the same stuff that you’re having, again, it’s not a coincidence. There’s too many people out here just within a couple of mile radius that’s all experiencing some of the same stuff. You know, the best thing about all this, we didn’t know a lot of our neighbors. I didn’t know Danny, I didn’t know Cheryl, I didn’t know a lot of our neighbors. Man. This has brought the community together very rapidly for us to join together.
Because I shared this earlier with you. It’s like environmental euthanasia. We’re all out here in this together, man. We hear when one person, one of our friends had a pulmonary embolism and he was fine. When things like that start happening or if we don’t hear from somebody in a few days, we’re like, okay, is everybody okay? We hear ambulance come down the road, we’re texting each other. Hey, is that going to your house? We never had to do that before. We are now on such hypervigilant alerts about things firetruck go by. Is there anything going on out at the plant? I mean, again, we can’t live peacefully anymore. They’ve invaded that piece and we all stay just hypervigilant all the time. And like Danny said, you don’t sleep. So the community out here is like a war zone is kind of what I also equate it to. And you never know what bomb’s going to go off next.
Virginia Browning:
I was just going to say when she said, you don’t know what bomb’s going to go off next, and we know it’s going to go off and it’s going to hit one of our friends, even though the ones we don’t know personally. But the thing of it is when we speak, when we’re talking to you, we’re talking for all of us out here. Our voice is what you hear, but we’re speaking for them too. So it’s not just a few of us. It’s all of us. And we don’t know how to get out of this. It is just like she said, it’s a war zone and we don’t have any kind of backup, and that’s what we want. We want backup and then we want it cleared out.
Nick Browning:
Another thing we have is she and I are retired. We lived on a fixed income and we’re not the only one. There’s a lot of retired people out here. They try to say that this is an industrial area, it’s not an industrial area, it’s home sites. That’s it. There’s no industrial area out here. But they moved in on top of us anyway, and when they got people coming out here to work on that plant, they shut that plant down. They’re not even running with those people working inside there. And another thing, when they find out if there’s a reporter or something coming, I don’t know where they get their information, but they’ll shut down. They won’t be running, but it’s extremely loud over at Danny’s house. It’s louder at this house than it is at our house. I don’t know if they kind of live down in the valley.
And then we also have a whole bunch of Spanish people that live across the road from it. They live right next to that thing. And some of them have been getting sick, but they won’t say anything because they scared they’ll get in trouble because I don’t know if they’re illegal or illegal, but they’ve been here for 30 something years. So they’re my neighbors. And when we first started feeding all the, I feed the deer, the squirrel, the animals starting off, I had anywhere from eight to 10 squirrels. Well, I had one squirrel left today. I don’t have any squirrels and only just a few deer and just about everything else is gone. There’s just very few animals around here. But when they find out a news reporter or somebody’s coming shut down for two or three days and some of the animals have come back, but still no snakes, no, the bird population is way down. And I’ve been feeding them every day for the last 25 years out of here. And it’s just not happening. They’re just, they’re running everything,
Maximillian Alvarez:
Guys. I cannot help. But here the echoes of other sacrifice zones and other working class residents who have been poisoned, polluted, abandoned, and are dealing with different circumstances, but very similar situations to what you guys are dealing with. It’s harrowing how similar these stories sound. And it’s so mind blowing how different the causes can be. But I’ve heard from so many residents who live near concentrated animal feeding operations, chickens, cows. And they look at that and they know that the waste that these animals are producing and being housed in these massive lagoons and being sprayed over their neighbor’s farmlands, they can see that that’s all getting into their water. The folks here in South Baltimore, I’ve seen the uncovered coal cars car after car after car for miles on these CSX trains not covered. And the wind is just blowing this toxic cold dust all over the place.
And I’ve seen residents wipe it off their windows and yet all the while they’re being told, oh, how do you know it’s cold? Not us. That could be any kind of black dust. Oh, you have respiratory problems. It’s probably because you smoked a cigarette two decades ago. Right? The burden is always put on the residents and it’s never put on the big fat obvious polluters at the center of these stories. And it’s just maddening to hear another community going through something like this. But I think one thing I wanted to ask about is when I’m talking to folks in these other areas and the industries involved, there’s always something that they can at least grasp about those industries. Like, okay, coal, yeah, it’s dirty, but we need it for energy and metallurgical processes. The chicken cafo down the street. Yeah, it’s gross and dirty, but people got to eat chickens. Right? I’ve heard these kinds of things. I just wanted to ask, as you and your other neighbors started realizing what was happening in your town, what did you think all of this was for? What did you know anything about Bitcoin? What is it like to know that you’re going through all this for something like Bitcoin mining?
Danny Lakey:
I don’t know. That was a pretty hard pill for me to swallow at the beginning. It’s really rough because all it is is it’s profiting a corporation and obviously the people are in Bitcoin, but the bitcoin mining people, they’re processing transactions. They’re doing data calculations at phenomenal rates and encoding and uncoding and encrypting. I mean, it’s crazy, but that’s how they’re making their money. So it is just to enrich. A corporation has no play on anything else. It was more disheartening in Texas, obviously Texas is, we like to be the wild wild west and we don’t want anybody bothering with our land and let us do our thing, but that’s if it doesn’t encroach on other people. And this does. And then the Bitcoin mining is part of Greg Abbott’s grand plan to get enough power to cover the state anytime we have peak issues, so we don’t have one of the snow issues like we had a few years back, that’s part of his plan.
If they bring in the Bitcoin mines that drive the power, then they build more power plants that get to sell their power on a regular basis, but then they have more power on the grid for when there’s an emergency. So I understand the process, but to do that, you have opened up a state that doesn’t have any regulations on this. So now they can move. In Texas, if you are not in an incorporated city of some kind, there are no regulations. And so they don’t have any regulations. They don’t have to ask for remission. It’s why they say that they are in an industrial zone. They’re not in an industrial zone. They’re on a piece of property owned by the electric plant. And every square inch that borders that electric plant is either residential, farmland, agricultural, or used for cows or goats. I mean it is an agricultural or a residential piece of property, every inch of it.
And then they want to say, oh, it’s in a well-known industrial area. No, it’s on the grounds of an electric plant and you’re there so you don’t have to pay distribution fees to power running through somebody’s power lines to get to you and you can buy it by the gigawatt on the open market in Texas. So I mean it was very disheartening because you’re no longer fighting the Bitcoin company. You’re fighting Greg Abbott’s master plan. And then we found out it was data centers now, which does ai, and they’re tying AI into our national defense. So now we’re fighting the federal government, the state government, and the stupid mining companies.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Do they say it’s going to bring jobs and economic stimulus or what? I mean, what is it that they’re actually, what are they doing besides using a shit ton of water, pardon my French, and creating a shit ton of sound pollution right next to your homes and generating a shit ton of money for people who are not you?
Danny Lakey:
Well, and now with the more power, they’re about to build a third power plant, which is going to generate more air pollution. So we have water pollution, air pollution, noise pollution, so we got the good trifecta going on. They also recently built a solar farm and as great as good energy is, that heats the air up around it. It’s killing all the birds. So we’ve got increased temperature, increased air pollution, increased noise pollution, and increased water pollution. And what we’re getting out of it is about $8 million a year to the Granbury school districts. And when we appeal to Granbury and ask them to do it because we’re in the county, they have made it very clear we are not part of Granbury.
Virginia Browning:
The day that we read in the newspaper that all of this out here didn’t concern Granbury because we were not in the Granbury city limits. That was a slap in the face. They let us know we’re out here by ourselves and they really don’t care about Granberry doesn’t care about the country around the city. They don’t care about the part of Hood County that doesn’t say Granberry city limits. They just don’t care. And that’s where we are. We are out here floundering by ourselves. It’s like you’re in the boat in the middle of the ocean with no oars. That’s what we feel like.
Karen Pearson:
Danny says it a little more elegant than what we can as far as I guess some of the staff that I think that the people in Texas are not really realizing. And even we have had so much ridicule and people saying that we’re just doing this because we want money and this and that. We’re doing this. We want our peace, but we’re also doing this because for future generations and also in Texas, like what he mentioned, the Bitcoin plants are buying kilowatts at very, very low cost per kilowatt, saving it up. And then when the grid starts weakening and there needs to be more, they then go to the Bitcoin companies and buy it back from them at the consumer’s expense. We are the ones that have to pay for that extra kilowatts or whatever that they’re selling back. And why is it that these companies who, and again, they’re not contributing to jobs in the area, they’re not contributing to the local economy out here where they’re located.
I beg to differ that even I don’t even, I bet not even five of their employees even live here in Granbury or Hood County. So all at our expense, they’re making money. The people in Texas are buying the electricity back at probably double or better rates whenever the grid goes down. And that’s what I don’t think people understand. It’s almost like the great Ponzi scheme is what it seems like and it’s people like you that get the word out. For us, that’s been what has helped us tremendously in this fight. Like mom said, we’re kind of out here floundering all on our own all together, sick as some of us are trying to just be heard and give us our peace back.
Nick Browning:
They’re not allowed in China. They were run out of China, and so why did they come to Texas? It’s just a scheme is all it is and we’re kind of sick and tired of it. I don’t know what we can do about it, but they keep saying that they’re not karma us, but they are. Every one of them, I think that people in town, their palms were padded and that’s why they said we’re not part of Granbury. We’re out here in Hoods County, out in the country, out on our own. It is a scheme. It’s just a scheme. That’s it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Now I wanted to ask you guys with just the last few minutes that we have together, and again, this will not be the only time we cover this story, I promise y’all, we are going to do follow-ups and I want to get y’all on panels with folks that we’ve spoken to from other areas of the country where they’re dealing with industrial pollution or other awful things that have upended their lives. So we promised everyone listening that we are going to stay on this story, but with the time we have left in this episode, I wanted to just ask if you guys could bring us up to speed on where things stand now and what if anything is being done to address your concerns. Have you gotten any help from local officials? Is that help coming from local organizations, community led groups, what is being done and what needs to be done to help you guys get out of this hell that you’re living in?
Danny Lakey:
Well, we’ve had some help. We have a couple of county commissioners that are on our side that have helped us out. They helped get a study, but all we could get was about $6,000. So it was a very small study. We were glad to have it, but you need a bigger sound study in a bigger area than what you can do with six grand and we wouldn’t have been able to get any more out of it. So we were glad to get that. We’ve gotten a lot of help from national media, some international media, and anybody that wants to come out and talk to us, we really, really, really appreciate just people putting eyes on it because that’s about the only place we’re going to get some help. We’re not going to get it from our county. Judge kind of holds all the cards. He gets his little party paid for by people.
Senator Birdwell who is our state senator, he’s of no help. I had a 45 minute conversation trying to get them to not give a grant to the electric plant to expand the electric planning larger and I thought he was on our side and then 45 minutes later he voted against us. So he is not help our local congresswoman. She is not of any help. We are getting some help out of Somerville County, which is our neighboring county because they are impacted too. And everybody down in Somerville has been very, very helpful. So we want to put that out. There’s a lady by the name of Cheryl Shedden who is the driver of our bus. She lives a little bit closer to the plant than I do, so she gets it even worse than I do. And she’s been here quite a while. She is the leader of our ring. She keeps everybody motivated. So you got to give a shout out to Cheryl for all the work she’s done. We’ve got some good news.
We’ve been enough contact with people for litigation about various different things. One, we were fighting to get an injunction to try to get the marathon to stop the noise, bury it, put a building over it, move it out. I don’t care, but just stop the noise. You can do all the Bitcoin mining you want over there. I don’t care, but stop killing me with the noise. Earth Justice came on board to help us with that suit and that is in progress right now and we’re very grateful to them because they’re doing that free of charge. And so they heard about us and offered us our services. We started a nonprofit called Protected County. We had to do that because of litigation. They needed a leadership group. They needed a name. And so we got a 5 0 1 C3 status. We are currently trying to raise $5,000 to fight building a third power plant.
Like I said, the state granted them money to build it. We were able to get enough people and enough written documents to where it’s the first time in the state of Texas that an air permit was not issued to a gas power plant. So they held off on issuing the permit, which made them forfeit their grant. Now they’re going to reapply and the permit has not been diluted. It’s just going through a hearing process. We’ve got a meeting coming up with the state and if we survive that, then we have to go in front of a judge and plead our case for a final ruling on it. And that’s really where we’ve got, we’ve had quotes from 25 to $75,000 when we finally found an attorney that says, if you get there, I’ll take it for five grand and get you in there. But none of us are independently wealthy.
I mean, we may have some land, but land in Texas is not expensive. And these are our retirement homes. We’re not sitting on millions and millions of dollars. I think the Bitcoin mine’s worth about five or 6 billion and the electric company’s worth about 60 or 70 billion. So they’ve got some deep pockets and we’re having to fight ’em. But we did get that injunction to hold off on the air permit, which was a huge win. And we’re hoping that we have a meeting with Marathon and we’re hoping we can have a little bit of a win before the end of the month. But anything anybody can do, if you just want to read about it, you can go to protect hood county.com. There’s a lot of information on it. Like I said, we have a 5 0 1 C3 status that if anybody wants to help donate, we can’t thank you enough.
Again, other communities, other states, other areas are going to be fighting this because it’s no longer Bitcoin. It’s now data centers and the federal government is leaking the power of AI as to how we’re going to fight China in the future and they want to stay ahead of ’em and we have to have power to do it. We’ve got to have it all over the country. So these things are not going away and we need some fight to get some regulation on it. Let’s find a happy way to do it. It was mentioned before that China kicked them out their data centers, they’re bearing in the south seat because it cools ’em. And of course there’s no noise down there. So they’re bury him down in the ocean and then running the power to it to their AI centers are coming back. I’m not saying we go that extreme, but there’s got to be a compromise in ruining all of our lives and killing us slowly is not the answer.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think that was powerfully put. And Karen, Nick, Virginia, I kind of wanted to just toss it to you to round us out. I think Danny really underlined the most important point here. When I talked to people about why we do this coverage on this show, because for years and even still, we talk to union workers. We talk to people organizing their workplaces. We talk to people in non-union shops about their lives and their jobs. It’s a show buy and for working class people. And so some people will ask, well, why are you talking about a Bitcoin mine in rural Texas? And I’m like, well, who do you think are the people living around this place? They are our fellow workers. They are the people whose lives and ability to make a living are being upended by this. We haven’t even talked about what this is doing to the farmers who live around there or to anyone who’s trying to kind of work the land around this Bitcoin mine and the way it’s impacting them.
But we’ve talked about how you all as flesh and blood people working people, retirees, how this is impacting you and your daily lives. So for everyone listening, just think about what it’s like to try to get through your day-to-day life, make a living while enduring this level of sound, pollutions, stress, and all the gaslighting that comes with it. That’s why we’re talking about it because this is wrong and working people standing together is the only way that we’re going to get out of it. And I wanted to kind of let you guys have the last word and ask if you had any final messages to the working people who listen to this show, the folks in other sacrifice zones who listen to this show, any final messages you wanted to send from out there in Granbury to the folks listening,
Karen Pearson:
We’re out here fighting for everyone, and there is a handful of us that are not giving up. We have big voices and we have a lot of spunk in us. And like he said, Cheryl Shedden, she’s our rockstar team leader in all of this, and we’re motivated to stand toe to toe with them. We might not have the money for attorneys or whatever we would like to. It’s kind of funny, those of us who, like Danny said, we own property and stuff, but they’re on a fixed income. I work 40 hours a week to make ends meet myself. And even when we are needing funds for small projects that we have to keep going with, I come to mom and dad and ask them, do you have $10? Mom will usually give me 20. I’m like, well, just give me 10. That’s all I need.
She’s like, no, you just take this. Even on their fixed income, they still find it necessary to give into this because again, mom’s been in the hospital several times and she still worries about her neighbor. She thinks there’s somebody else that’s worse off than what she is. So the sacrifices that we are all making to try to take care of each other is huge. Like Danny said, go to the website, read on there, join, get on the mailing list. You can keep up with things there. We’re not attorneys, but you know what? We’re fighting this as if we are, there’s five of us that are going toe to toe up against this air permit and to try to, if we can’t block it, then we want to come in with some mediation and we want to put up some safeguards. We’re not stopping and we’re not giving up.
And you can intimidate us as big as you want with your money or your corporation, but we’re not going to go away. And I would say that to any community that’s fighting like we are just what? Stand up for your life because no one else is going to do it for you. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re standing up for our lives, the quality of our lives that we wanted and laid out for ourselves and then also for the others who can’t fight for themselves. We’re not quitting and we’re not going away. So one way another, we’re going to keep plugging.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests from Granbury, Texas, Danny Lakey, Karen Pearson and her parents, Nick and Virginia Browning. And I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
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