alt Hacker News> Stephenson said the data center’s operations team had not seen any “abnormalities” on the day in question.
> “However, we take any reports of issues at the site seriously,” Stephenson wrote
Absolutely no abnormalities because this is by design, but nobody wanted to pay attention when approving the building and zoning. Amazing what some money to politicians will get you.
I can't even imaging living within ear shot of these things. Horrific quality of life. I can't sleep when my water pump is active.
> Turner said county officials didn’t understand in 2022 and 2023 exactly what it meant to have gas turbines at a data center, nor did they have zoning rules to address it.
Well then why were they allowed to vote on it ? It's incompetance ? Or just straight up corruption.
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It's getting difficult to tell the difference between incompetence and corruption, as widespread as both of them are, and how their consequences always overlap.
A consequence on our focus on legislation rather than the more natural legal apths of addressing these problems, e.g. easements and tort law.
Or they don't see the problem. Someone's paying 600-900k to live in a townhouse 1000 ft from the runways at Dulles Airport
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/?category=SEMANTIC&sea...
My wife and I travel in our RV a lot and used to full time. Some RV parks - even when full - are often totally quiet and peaceful at least enough to not notice a slight background noise of cars driving around here and there.
Then a family will arrive that seems like they're at a Disney theme park and you just hear screaming kids non-stop. It's like a tornado is hitting for days. We always joke if you ask a tornado if it's quiet it will answer of course- I don't hear anything. Because there is NOTHING louder than the tornado and that's all it knows.
What do you mean, "allowed" to vote on it? The county officials are the decisionmakers, who should have allowed or not allowed them?
It also seems worth noting that these gas turbine generators are meant to be the solution to another big complaint people have about datacenters, that they might drive up local power prices if they plug into the grid. Like you and the people in the article, I'm personally very sensitive to noise pollution. so to me this sounds like another argument that datacenters should connect to the grid after all. But I'm sure some people disagree and think it's worth it to save on electricity, and others disagree and think there shouldn't be datacenters near them at all.
The local government has to resolve the disagreement somehow and no solution is going to make everyone happy.
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