Outraged residents are suing the operator

Facilities that mine cryptocurrency run 24/7 and need to be cooled. Residents of a town in Texas are now suing the mining company there. The noise pollution cannot be tolerated in the long term.

Noise from fans

In Granbury, Texas, Marathon Digital has a building in which Bitcoin is mined. The 300 megawatt facility houses over 20,000 individual computers. Some of them are cooled with water. This is noiseless, as every ambitious hobby PC builder knows. The traditional alternative to cooling chips is via fans. They usually don’t cause too much noise. However, when there are thousands of them spinning, it can become unbearable in the long run.

At least that’s what the residents of the town of 11,000 argue. A number of them have now filed a lawsuit against the operator of the system. The constant humming causes stress, sleep disorders and other problems. The environmental organization Earthjustice speaks of “direct health effects due to constant noise pollution” for over a dozen people.

Lawsuit should help

The organization’s lawyers are now seeking to have a jury declare Bitcoin mining a nuisance because it violates homeowners’ right to freely use their property.

If you are constantly denied sleep or constantly have to deal with the noise in the background, it is an unreasonable burden.

Operator sees no problem

According to Marathon Digital, it is already trying to increase the proportion of water-cooled computers from the current 30 percent to 50 percent by the end of the year. But that shouldn’t amount to an admission of guilt. Because how Inside Climate News reports, the operator writes in an email: “The noises emanating from our operations are within the normal range that people are exposed to on a daily basis from various sources.”

But that shouldn’t be any comfort to residents like Danny Lakey. He can still hear the hum of the fans even in his house. He could no longer sit on the terrace because of the noise.

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