On a night in December 2023, 43-year-old small enterprise proprietor Sarah Rosenkranz collapsed in her dwelling in Granbury, Texas and was rushed to the emergency room. Her coronary heart pounded 200 beats per minute; her blood stress spiked into hypertensive disaster; her cranium throbbed. “It felt like my head was in a pressure vise being crushed,” she says. “That pain was worse than childbirth.”
Rosenkranz’s migraine lasted for 5 days. Medical doctors gave her a number of rounds of IV treatment and painkiller pictures, however nothing appeared to knock down the ache, she says. This was odd, particularly as a result of native medical doctors have been equally vexed when Indigo, Rosenkranz’s 5-year-old daughter, was taken to pressing care earlier that 12 months, screaming that she felt a “red beam behind her eardrums.”
It didn’t happen to Sarah that these signs might be linked. However in January 2024, she walked right into a city corridor in Granbury and located a room full of individuals worn skinny from unusual, debilitating sicknesses. A mom mentioned her 8-year-old daughter was shedding her listening to and fluids have been leaking from her ears. A number of ladies mentioned they skilled fainting spells, together with whereas driving on the freeway. Others mentioned they have been wracked by debilitating vertigo and nausea, waking up in the course of the night time mid-vomit.
None of them knew what, precisely, was inflicting these signs. However all of them shared a singular grievance: a boring aural hum had crept into their lives, which growled or roared relying on the time of day, rattling their home windows and rendering them unable to sleep. The hum, native legislation enforcement had discovered, was emanating from a Bitcoin mining facility that had not too long ago moved into the realm—and was exceeding authorized noise ordinances each day.
Over the course of a number of months in 2024, TIME spoke to greater than 40 folks within the Granbury space who reported a medical ailment that they imagine is linked to the arrival of the Bitcoin mine: hypertension, coronary heart palpitations, chest ache, vertigo, tinnitus, migraines, panic assaults. At the least 10 folks went to pressing care or the emergency room with these signs. The event of large-scale Bitcoin mines and information facilities is kind of new, and most of them are housed in extraordinarily distant locations. There have been no main medical research on the impacts of dwelling close to one. However there’s an rising physique of scientific research linking extended publicity to noise air pollution with cardiovascular injury. And one native physician—ears, nostril, and throat specialist Salim Bhaloo—says he sees sufferers with signs probably stemming from the Bitcoin mine’s noise on an nearly weekly foundation.
“I’m sure it increases their cortisol and sugar levels, so you’re getting headaches, vertigo, and it snowballs from there,” Bhaloo says. “This thing is definitely causing a tremendous amount of stress. Everyone is just miserable about it.”
Not all information facilities make noise. And trade insiders say they’ve a technical repair for those that do, which entails changing their services’ loud air followers with a lot quieter liquid-based cooling options. However a few of their touted strategies, together with “immersion cooling” in oil, are costly and untested on a big scale.
A consultant for Marathon Digital Holdings, the corporate that owns the mine, didn’t reply questions on well being impacts, however instructed TIME that it’s working to take away the noisy followers from the location. “By the end of 2024, we intend to have replaced the majority of air-cooled containers with immersion cooling, with no expansion required. Initial sound readings on immersion containers indicate favorable results in sound reduction and compliance with all relevant state noise ordinances,” they wrote in an e mail.
The variety of commercial-scale Bitcoin mining operations within the U.S. has elevated sharply over the previous few years; there at the moment are no less than 137. Comparable medical complaints have been registered close to services in Arkansas and North Dakota. And the Bitcoin mining trade is urgently making an attempt to push payments by way of state legislatures, together with in Indiana and Missouri, which might exempt Bitcoin mines from native zoning or noise ordinances. In Might, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed a “Bitcoin Rights” invoice to guard miners and forestall any future makes an attempt to ban the trade.
Whereas some Granbury residents are fiercely protesting the mine, many others really feel powerless to change the desire of an organization with authorized, political, and monetary would possibly. And the info middle trade at giant is just rising extra dominant, due to the dual forces of Bitcoin mining and AI, the latter which spends an unlimited quantity of vitality coaching generative fashions to seek out patterns in information units. In keeping with a latest report, information facilities will use 8% of whole U.S. energy by 2030, up from 3% in 2022. And if operators proceed to find the facilities close to present communities and prioritize income above all else, then the story of Granbury might grow to be the story of numerous small cities throughout America.
Granbury sits about an hour southwest of Fort Price in Hood County, which homes a principally rural and Republican inhabitants of about 65,000 folks. A few 15-minute drive south of Granbury’s charming historic city middle—which features a Nineteenth-century opera home—lies a gasoline plant known as Wolf Hole II. Driving towards the plant on a windy, predawn morning in Might, it rises out of the sky like an oil rig in a pitch-black ocean, lights ablaze.
However the glowing gasoline plant by no means induced substantial points for the native residents. Moderately, the issues began when Constellation Vitality, which operated the plant, signed a deal in 2021 to energy a brand new Bitcoin mining facility that might sit straight on its lot. The brand new facility consisted of 163 squat metallic containers resembling transport containers, which housed a complete of over 30,000 computer systems. These computer systems began operating in the summertime of 2022, and appeared to be switched on all day and night time. As of December 2023, the Granbury mine is owned and operated by Marathon, one of many largest Bitcoin holders on this planet.
The computer systems energy a course of known as proof-of-work mining. Moderately than counting on a central financial institution or governmental company, Bitcoin is created, maintained, and guarded by watchdogs all over the world often known as miners, who stop tampering by way of a fancy cryptographic course of and are rewarded with bitcoin for doing so. Bitcoin’s first supporters hoped that this new system would assist a world digital forex that might carry freedom, monetary equity, and wealth to its adopters.
However the system additionally requires an immense and ever-increasing quantity of electrical energy. Whereas Bitcoin’s first miners have been solo operators typically understanding of their bedrooms, the trade is now dominated by a handful of billion-dollar firms who function industrial-size server farms throughout the globe. Within the month of March 2024 alone, the Bitcoin mining trade generated a report $2 billion in income.
A lot of the American Bitcoin mining trade can now be present in Texas, dwelling to massive energy vegetation, lax regulation, and crypto-friendly politicians. In October 2021, Governor Greg Abbott hosted the lobbying group Texas Blockchain Council on the governor’s mansion. The group insisted that their trade would assist the state’s overtaxed vitality grid; that in vitality crises, miners could be one of many few vitality prospects capable of shut off upon request, offered that they have been paid in trade. After assembly with the lobbyists, Abbott tweeted that Texas would quickly be the “#1 [state] for blockchain & cryptocurrency.” The next month, the Commissioners Courtroom of Hood County accepted the event of a cryptocurrency operation at Wolf Hole. The homeowners promised native jobs and mentioned that they’d principally use “stranded energy” that might in any other case go unused.
For months throughout 2022, Granbury residents Nick and Virginia Browning sat of their entrance yard watching the brand new metallic containers of the large facility be put in within the filth throughout the highway. “It layered our houses with dust. We haven’t gotten it all out yet,” Nick Browning, 82, says.
The mud, it seems, was only a prelude to the noise. So as to cool the machines, the location’s operators hooked up hundreds of followers to the containers, which churned consistently, emitting a vicious buzz. As extra machines have been switched on, the noise seemed like a ceiling fan, then a leaf blower, then a jet engine. It consumed afternoon canine walks and revved by way of cloudless nights, vibrating the trailer houses of lots of the low-income residents who stay blocks from the ability. The noise floated miles down the winding Brazos river, by way of the plush golf programs within the gated group Pecan Plantation and previous county strains.
At first, residents responded to the intrusion by vacating their porches, retreating inside, and turning up their followers and air conditioners to the max. However many nonetheless felt tremors of their beds—together with Larry Potts, a 77-year-old retired pastor who lives up the highway from the plant. Potts says he stopped sleeping and began shedding listening to in each ears. In February, his coronary heart gave out after one other sleepless night time; he was rushed to the hospital and saved alive by an exterior pacemaker. There, he was identified with third diploma atrioventricular block, hypertension, and despair.
“I’m sick of this world and all this mess around here,” he says he instructed his spouse that day, referring to the Bitcoin mine’s noise. “We moved out here for the peace and quiet. But this has made me want to go.”
Some close by residents say they haven’t been affected. However the variety of unusual medical emergencies within the space have piled up. Along with Potts’ discharge papers, TIME reviewed medical information offered by a number of Granbury residents. Hospital notes from 72-year-old Geraldine Lathers’ three-day keep doc new prescriptions for hypertension and vertigo. Jenna Hornbuckle, 38, misplaced listening to in her proper ear and was identified with coronary heart failure; ear exams doc her listening to loss together with that of her 8-year-old daughter Victoria, who contracted ear infections that pressured medical doctors to put a tube in her ear. And Avari Burns, a 19-year-old most cancers affected person, says she suffered from crippling migraines at dwelling—however each time she went to a Fort Price hospital for chemotherapy, the migraines subsided.
Virginia Browning, 81, who can see the Bitcoin mine from her entrance yard, says she was taken to pressing care with violent vertigo after waking up one night time mid-vomit. Browning says she will get so dizzy she will barely stroll in a straight line, and that she hardly ever sleeps by way of the night time. “When they crank this thing,” she says shakily, “I’m wide awake.”
“We’re living in a nightmare,” Sarah Rosenkranz says, sitting at a barbecue restaurant in downtown Granbury on an evening in May. As rock music blares from the speakers and other patrons chatter away, Rosenkranz pulls out her phone and clocks 72 decibels on a sound meter app—the same level that she records in Indigo’s bedroom in the dead of night. In early 2023, her daughter began waking up, yelling and holding her ears. Indigo’s room directly faces the mine, which sits about a mile and a half away. She soon refused to sleep in her own room. She then developed so many ear infections that Rosenkranz pulled her from school in March and learned how to homeschool her for the rest of the semester.
Over grilled salmon and hush puppies, Rosenkranz shares that her family has been sleeping peacefully at an inn downtown for the last three days in order to get away from the noise. But the next morning, after returning home, she contracts yet another migraine that lands her in urgent care.
Dr. Bhaloo, the ENT doctor in Granbury, says he’s seen an uptick since the new year in patients whose ailments—including ringing in their ears, vertigo, and headaches—could be related to the mine. “These people here, they’re good country folks, and Bitcoin, to them, is almost a foreign alien thing,” he says. “They don’t understand it. And [the noise] is detrimental to their health and anxiety.” Dr. Stephen Krzeminski, another Granbury ENT, agrees. “Sonic damage is real, there’s no disputing that,” he says. Krzeminski says he believes the mine is causing “mental and physical” health issues. “Imagine if I had vuvuzela in your ear all the time,” he says.
The level of noise is appalling to Dr. Thomas Münzel, a German cardiologist who is a leader in the growing field of scientific researchers measuring the impact of urban and industrial noise on humans. For the last 15 years, Münzel has studied how transportation and urban noise, especially at night, can be debilitating stressors on the heart, brain, and cardiovascular systems. In one study, he exposed young, healthy students to noise events up to 63 decibels, and found that their vascular function diminished after just a single night. In other studies, he’s found that nighttime noise pollution directly leads to heart failure and molecular changes in the brain, which may lead to impaired cognitive development of children and make some people more prone to developing dementia.
“The European Environmental Agency tells us that everything above 55 decibels is making us sick,” he says. The fact that the Granbury Bitcoin mine is emitting 70 or even 90 decibels on a nightly basis is “like torture,” he says. “The most spectacular cardiovascular diseases will develop. They have to stop the machines.”
Health effects have the potential to extend past the human residents of Granbury. Studies have shown that man-made noise pollution harms animals and wildlife, causing oxidative stress and memory loss in rodents, acute anxiety in dogs, and a decrease in forest growth. Shenice Copenhaver’s dog, Persephone, started going bald and developed debilitating anxiety shortly after the Bitcoin mine began operating four blocks away. Directly next door, Tom Weeks’ dog Jack Rabbit Slim started shaking and hyperventilating uncontrollably for hours on end; a vet placed him on the seizure medication Gabapentin. Rosenkranz’s chickens stopped laying eggs for months. And Jerry and Patricia Campbell’s centuries-old oak tree, which had served as the family’s hub and protector for generations of backyard family reunions and even a wedding, died suddenly three months ago.
It’s nearly impossible to prove the Bitcoin mine directly caused the afflictions of these specific animals and plants. But as the strange anecdotes collect, they’ve added to the stress of a town that feels under siege from all directions.
“I’ve lived in Texas all my life and I’ve never seen an oak tree be beautiful one year and die the next,” Jerry Campbell says on his lawn, beneath the tree’s gnarled, blackened limbs. “It’s so strange.”
Hood County Constable John Shirley has spent months trying to find his own solutions to a problem that at times seems supernatural. As a former member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia whose leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy against the U.S. government, Shirley is a somewhat divisive figure in the town. But lately Shirley has been laser-focused on the mine—an issue he considers apolitical. “When you’ve got Greenpeace supporting the same cause as a former Oath Keeper, what weird episode of the Twilight Zone are we in?” he says, chuckling darkly. (Shirley resigned from the Oath Keepers before Jan. 6, 2021, due to “serious concerns” with the direction of the organization, he says.)
On a listless May morning before the sun has risen, Shirley is sitting in his truck across the road from the mine. He is used to getting up at this hour, as he’s been taking decibel readings of the plant around the clock in order to write tickets against the mine’s operators for disorderly conduct. Shirley sticks his recorder out the window and the numbers on it flicker up and down as the roar washes over it. Eventually, the recorder caps out at 91 decibels, which the CDC estimates as roughly in between the output of a lawnmower and a chainsaw.
This level of noise, the CDC writes, can cause hearing damage after two hours of exposure. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration advises that employees can only work in 90-decibel settings for eight hours a day and are required to wear ear protection. And Texas state penal code deems any noise above 85 decibels unreasonable. Over the course of 2024, Shirley has recorded a noise above 85 decibels coming from the plant more than 35 times.
Technically there is federal mandate to regulate noise, which stems from the 1972 Noise Control Act—but it was essentially de-funded during the Reagan administration. This leaves noise regulation up to states, cities, and counties. New York City, for instance, has a noise code which officially caps restaurant music and air conditioning at 42 decibels (as measured within a nearby residence). Texas’s 85 decibels, in contrast, is by far the loudest state limit in the nation, says Les Blomberg, the executive director of the nonprofit Noise Pollution Clearinghouse. “It is a level that protects noise polluters, not the noise polluted,” he says.
Ultimately, Constable John Shirley can’t stop the machines, because there is no state law forcing the operator of a noisy machine to turn it off. When Shirley writes a ticket for disorderly conduct, it merely triggers a $500 fine, as opposed to jail time or another punitive measure. Hood County can’t even pass a relevant noise ordinance law: only Texas cities, not counties, have the ability to do so.
Shirley’s tickets now add up to a theoretical fine of $17,500 and counting. But that number is chump change for Marathon, which earned $165 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2024 and bragged to shareholders about “record earnings.” And the company is fighting back: They have requested a jury trial to overturn this low-level misdemeanor, which starts July 8. At a pre-trial hearing in May, the company arrived with a full team of lawyers. “To bring two or three full-suited attorneys to a justice of the peace court citation issue: I’ve never seen that,” says Patrick Ryan, a local lawyer who has consulted with Granbury community members about the possibility of a civil nuisance lawsuit. “They’re coming with both barrels.”
A representative for Marathon declined several interview requests with TIME, saying that the company would refrain from commenting publicly until Constable Shirley’s “unwarranted” citations against the plant had been resolved. As Shirley sits outside the facility recording the pulsating drone, his nostrils flare, and his voice rises with impatience. “When I was a murder investigator and someone killed somebody, I had the law on my side,” he says. “With this, it’s like I’m swatting at a rhinoceros.” As he reads the decibel levels on his sound meter, a security guard from the facility steps out of his car and snaps pictures of Shirley’s truck in the dark.
The residents of Granbury feel they’ve been lied to. In 2023, the site’s previous operators, US Bitcoin Corp, constructed a wall around the mine almost 2,000 feet long and claimed that they had “solved the concern.” But Shirley says that the complaints from the community about the sound actually increased when the wall was nearing completion last fall. Since Marathon bought the facility outright in December, its hash rate, or computational power expended, has doubled.
As complaints mounted at the top of 2024, the company contended it did not know about the extent of the sound issues. “We are now the owners, but we are not the operator. USBTC is still the operator. Prior to the purchase, we were not aware of the noise issues,” a Marathon representative wrote to TIME in an email in January. “Now that we own the site and have been made aware of the issue, we are working to gather information and address the situation.”
But documents show that Marathon provided a $67 million loan in May 2021 to the site’s first formal owners, Compute North, to build out the site’s infrastructure, and Marathon’s purchase agreement of the site, dated December 15, 2023, clearly mentions the existence of the $1.9 million “sound wall” built several months prior.
As community complaints reached a fever pitch earlier this year, Marathon held a meet-and-greet on March 29—Good Friday, which rubbed many people in Granbury’s deeply religious community the wrong way. For the handful of people that did show up, Marathon laid out a noise mitigation plan which included turning off idle fans, moving some containers into liquid cooling by April 2024, and installing vegetation and trees around the perimeter.
In an emailed statement to TIME in late June, Marathon said that 58 air-cooled containers have been removed from the site, and pointed to a roadmap which vows to convert 50% of the site’s containers to immersion cooling by the end of the year. A representative for Constellation Energy, which owns the power plant that Marathon connects to, said in a statement that the company is “staying updated on [Marathon’s] efforts to respond to the concerns raised by neighbors… We will continue working closely with Marathon as they take actions to reduce their impacts.”
Marathon says that immersion cooling, in which computers are placed in tubs of oil, will largely fix the noise problem. But the technique has potential drawbacks, including the difficulty of regularly performing maintenance on a computer submerged in oil, says Kent Draper, the chief commercial officer of the Bitcoin and AI data center operator IREN. “Although it’s been around for a long time in the industry, it’s just not that widely adopted,” he says.
Even Marathon expressed skepticism about its ability to convert its many machines to immersion technology in a 2023 year-end SEC Report. “There is a risk we may not succeed in developing or deploying immersion-cooling at such a large scale to achieve sufficient cooling performance,” the company wrote.
In an e mail to TIME, Marathon wrote: “While we are confident in our ability to scale this new technology, it is our obligation, as a publicly traded company, to identify any potential risks from a financial perspective.”
Granbury community members are exploring political and legal avenues. A petition against the mine in Granbury and its “excessive and unhealthy noise” garnered 800 in-person signatures, and was brought by representatives to the Texas Republican state convention in San Antonio in May, with the hopes of gaining statewide support for some sort of ban. But two local elected officials, Nannette Samuelson and Shannon Wolf, say they tried to take the floor to stump for the issue, but weren’t given time to speak. Samuelson’s goal is now to pass resolutions in commissioners court prompting state senators to draft legislation.
Any statewide legislation is sure to hit significant headwinds, because the very idea of regulation runs contrary to many Texans’ political beliefs. “As constitutional conservatives, they have taken our core values and used that against us,” says Demetra Conrad, a city council member in the nearby town of Glen Rose.
Some community members are also exploring a potential civil nuisance suit against Marathon, in which they would seek an injunction against the company and/or damages. One affected woman, Cheryl Shadden—who has medically-documented hearing loss—has retained the nonprofit Earthjustice to examine potential litigative routes. Deputy managing attorney Mandy DeRoche says Earthjustice is exploring the possibility of taking its own sound readings near the site. The nonprofit has been involved in several lawsuits against crypto mining companies across the country.
“Historically, Bitcoin miners go to the cheapest source of electricity with the least amount of regulation, and they do the cheapest thing possible,” DeRoche says. “It’s one of the reasons why noise pollution from crypto mining tends to be so much worse than traditionally-operated data center operators.”
As Bitcoin continues to gain value, miners are building progressively bigger operations, causing gas plants and other fossil fuel emitters to spring back into action. It is unclear whether states even have the energy capacity to support this new demand: In June, Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick tweeted that Texans “will ultimately pay the price” for the growth of crypto and AI data centers, writing that they “produce very few jobs compared to the incredible demands they place on our grid.” Regardless, Bitcoin lobbying groups are attempting to pass pro-Bitcoin-mining bills in state legislatures across the country, which would exempt similar operations from noise ordinances and local zoning laws. People have reported similar symptoms near Bitcoin mines in Arkansas and Williston, North Dakota. Ultimately, Granbury is just one canary of several in the proverbial mine.
In the week before this article’s publication, two more Granbury residents suffered from acute health crises. The first was Tom Weeks, the owner of the hyperventilating dog. On July 2, Weeks, 64, rose after another sleepless night of listening to the mine and realized he couldn’t breathe. He was rushed to a Fort Worth hospital, where he was diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism—a blood clot blocking his lungs—and hooked up to an oxygen tank. Weeks was supposed to testify against Marathon in the jury trial, but is now physically unable to do so. “This whole thing is an eye opener for me into profit over people,” Weeks says in a phone call from the ICU.
The second person affected was the five-year-old Indigo Rosenkranz. On July 6, she suffered from a seizure and was taken to the emergency room, before being routed to a childrens’ hospital in Fort Worth for further testing. Her mother, Sarah, was terrified and now feels she has no choice but to get a second mortgage to move away from the mine. “A second one would really be a lot,” she says. “God will provide, though. He always sees us through.”