But a few counties away, near the town of Granbury, a large bitcoin mine is already causing some of the problems Sawicki predicts await Navarro County residents if her warnings are ignored.
When I pulled in Cheryl Shadden’s driveway Thursday afternoon, she was leaning over a bed of plants flanked by two large flowering shrubs that flanked the front porch of her home. She turned to greet me, revealing on the front of her T-shirt, like Sawicky, a slogan in all caps that read, “STOP BITCOIN!!” As I opened the car door, I was greeted by the noise: part hum and part gust of wind.
In 2022 bitcoin mining company Compute North set up a facility adjacent to Shaddon’s property, leasing the land from the operator of a gas-fired power plant already on the site. By the end of 2023, Shaddon claimed, the noise emanating from the mine had become unbearable. “It’s like you’ve been attacked by aliens,” she says.
Shaddon, a nurse anesthetist, has lived for 27 years in a modest bungalow on a lot in Granbury, Hood County, made up of fields and meadows separated by chain-link fences. With her lives a menagerie of animals, including cats, birds, horses and a pack of huge Great Pyrenees dogs.
On the day I visited, the turning of the fans from the mine did not pierce the walls of Shaddon; a phone app set the external sound to approximately 70 decibels, similar to a vacuum cleaner. But on some days, Shadden and other locals say, the noise is much worse. When the facility is at its loudest, some have to leave the area. “My heart is almost beating out of my chest,” said Chip Joslin, the new commissioner for neighboring Somervell County.
Schaden attributes a number of health problems to noise exposure, including inability to sleep, nausea and ringing in the ears. In late June, Schadden was diagnosed with tinnitus and sensorineural hearing loss, a type of impairment that can be caused by both aging and noise exposure. Other locals report similar problems: “First it was the earring, then it went downhill. Now I have a headache and high blood pressure… Listening to it makes me sick — actually sick,” said Geraldine Latters, who lives in a bungalow neighborhood near the facility.
