A Noisy Bitcoin Mine Is Causing A Health Crisis In A Texas Town

RACHEL FELTMAN: This is Science Friday. I’m Rachel Feltman. Later in the hour, the science behind the new film Twisters and how researchers made a real-life stillsuit inspired by Dune. Plus, what you should know about the raw milk craze.

But first, in the last few years, it’s been impossible to escape celebs and influencers and companies hyping up Bitcoin, AI, cryptocurrencies, all that stuff. And we’ve learned that it takes a massive amount of energy, water, and other resources to run the data centers that make these technologies possible.

But all of this buzzy tech could have an impact on public health, too. Residents of the small town of Granbury, Texas, say Bitcoin is more than just a figurative headache for them. Soon after a company opened up a Bitcoin mine there a couple of years ago, locals started experiencing excruciating migraines, hearing loss, nausea, panic attacks, and more. Several folks even ended up in the emergency room.

And the culprit behind these symptoms may surprise you. It’s all the noise. For Time Magazine, technology correspondent Andrew Chow investigated the health crisis in Granbury. He joins me now. Andrew, welcome to Science Friday.

ANDREW CHOW: Hi, Rachel.

RACHEL FELTMAN: So, Andrew, you visited Granbury for yourself. Can you describe the sounds we’re talking about that are coming from this Bitcoin mine?

ANDREW CHOW: So, to basically describe it very plainly, a Bitcoin mine is a server farm running thousands of computers that are using to uphold and safeguard the Bitcoin system. And they create new Bitcoin as well.

For all these computers running all day, all night, they need a lot of cooling. And so a lot, a lot of fans are attached to basically the outside of these makeshift structures that are emitting a whirring hum all the time. Now, there are a lot of people who hear that and are like, oh, well, I run a fan at night, or I use some sort of white noise machine.

But I was down in Granbury for a week, and I found that this noise was quite different. There was a sort of visceral, vibrating effect that it had, where residents are complaining that it is vibrating sort of through their walls, vibrating their window panes, that they can actually feel the shaking in their beds. It’s also not a sort of constant noise, but it goes voom, voom.

And I think what is really the problem is the night time noise. It’s waking people up from the dead of sleep. Then they’re getting stressed out, and they can’t get back to sleep. So I think and from what I’ve heard from doctors is that is sort of a crucial part of what may be contributing to the health impacts here.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Yeah, I definitely want to get into that medical aspect in a bit. But just for context, how loud are we talking, in decibels?

ANDREW CHOW: So I accompanied a local constable who has been tracking the noise of this Bitcoin mine, and I watched him record a peak of 91 decibels on his reader.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Oh, wow.

ANDREW CHOW: And this is right across the road from the mine. There are a couple residences where it was basically– felt that loud to me on other properties. The CDC says that 90 decibels is somewhere around a chainsaw or a lawn mower. And that’s sort of what it felt like to me, being there.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Yeah. Yeah, I know a blender is like 80 decibels. And what I think a lot of people don’t realize is that every 10 decibels is a 10x increase in–

ANDREW CHOW: It’s not a linear scale, so.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Right, yeah. And what do we know about at what point noise is so loud that it becomes dangerous?

ANDREW CHOW: Yeah, so there is a growing field of scientific study devoted to the health impacts of noise, particularly scientists looking at if you live under an airport or if you live next to a highway. One of the leaders in this field is the German cardiologist, Thomas Munzel, who’s been running controlled studies, both on rodents and humans.

So with rodents, it’s a little easier for him to actually see what’s going on in the brain and sort of trace what he says is causation. He says he did find vascular dysfunction and oxidative stress from loud noises. There was another study in which he exposed young, healthy students– this is human students– to noise events up to 63 decibels during the night and found that their vascular function diminished very quickly.

Munzel told me that, basically, there are two levels that we should be thinking about. So if a noise is over 90 decibels, it has the potential to damage our ears. So that’s when you’re getting tinnitus and potential hearing loss. And there are some folks in Granbury who have documented hearing loss over the last couple of years, a ton of folks who have tinnitus and fluids leaking from their ears.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Wow.

ANDREW CHOW: But then on a lower level, Dr. Munzel says even that noise between 50 and 60 decibels, especially at night, can stress your cardiovascular systems, leading to high cortisol levels or sympathetic nervous system activation.

And sort of, you’re getting different downstream effects. If this noise is sustained, it’s stressing you out. It’s causing you to lose sleep. And that, he says, can lead to blood pressure going up and making you higher at risk for diabetes and cholesterol and all sorts of downdraft symptoms. It can just spiral.

RACHEL FELTMAN: In your piece, you mentioned that there are people who have actually ended up in the emergency room for problems that they think are related to this noise?

ANDREW CHOW: Yeah, so we’re talking heart palpitations. We’re talking total heart stoppages, migraines, severe, severe migraines that one woman likened to being worse than childbirth, panic attacks, chest pain. It’s really, really hard to pin any specific person’s symptoms to the noise of the mine.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Of course.

ANDREW CHOW: It’s basically impossible at this point. All that I can do is go down there, talk to as many people as I can. So I spoke to over 40 people who said they had symptoms, over 10 people who had been to the emergency room, and try to track some of the similarities of these symptoms.

RACHEL FELTMAN: And in speaking with the folks down in Granbury, how are they dealing with the noise pollution?

ANDREW CHOW: They hate it. I just want to say that, first of all.

RACHEL FELTMAN: That’s understandable.

[LAUGHTER]

ANDREW CHOW: Beyond the 40 people I talked to personally, there was a petition of over 800 handwritten signatures for people saying that they had some sort of complaint, if not medical, just at least, quality of life-related with the mine. There are some people that are moving away, just because they can’t take it anymore.

There are a lot of other people who feel like they can’t, whether it’s because they feel like their property values have tanked because no one will want to live near this thing, or because they have family roots. They’ve always lived there. They inherited their father’s house. They can’t afford other places. This is not a wealthy part of Texas by any stretch.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Isn’t there any kind of federal law regulating noise pollution at this level?

ANDREW CHOW: It’s funny because in the 1970s, there was written a federal mandate to control noise and basically said loud noise is harming us as a country. But that initiative was essentially deregulated during the Reagan administration. Since then, it’s been up to states and counties to regulate noise.

Texas is unique in that, A, it has the highest noise threshold out of any state in the nation. It’s 85 decibels is when a noise is deemed unreasonable, as opposed to much lower thresholds in other states. One noise expert basically told me that this is a threshold that protects the noise polluting, as opposed to the noise polluted.

And the second thing that’s going on is that counties in Texas, if you’re outside city limits, you’re basically not allowed to pass a noise ordinance. So the residents, they’ve been trying to stump their local legislators. The legislators, they acknowledge it’s an issue, but they say that their hands are tied. The residents are exploring maybe can they bring some sort of nuisance lawsuit against the company. But that would really take months and months to work through the courts.

Or try to commission the EPA, or Earthjustice, or some sort of environmental body to conduct a study, and then bring some sort of legislative action. Again, that is going to take a long, long time to create a controlled sound study. And these people want relief now. They feel that their health is deteriorating way faster than any lawsuit could work through the courts.

So, mostly, they’re not really looking for damages. They want an injunction, and they want the noise to stop right now. And it doesn’t seem like that is going to happen anytime soon.

RACHEL FELTMAN: So what about Marathon, the company that owns the mine right now? Are they trying to do anything to reduce this noise?

ANDREW CHOW: Yes, Marathon is doing something about it. First, I want to note that they’ve flatly denied that the mine is the source of any health problems. So that’s the starter for that. But they do say that they want to be a good neighbor and that they’re in the process of taking the fans out and replacing that cooling system with something called immersion cooling, which involves placing the computers in oil.

So they say that at least half of all of the computers are going to be moved into immersion cooling by the end of 2024. And that is going to significantly reduce the sound, they said. And we’re just going to see if they keep their word.

RACHEL FELTMAN: And Andrew, you’ve been reporting on crypto and AI for Time. And I’m curious– as these fields grow, do you think we’re going to hear more stories like this one from Granbury?

ANDREW CHOW: I do. And I just want to flag that my book, Crypto Mania, which is the culmination of about three or four years of crypto reporting, comes out in about three weeks. So I’m excited for that.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Yeah, congratulations

ANDREW CHOW: Thank you. The number of data centers, whether from crypto or AI, is absolutely exploding. There are actually waiting lists in some areas for prospective data centers to get into these places. And there are some local legislators who worry that, right now, the projected power demands from AI outstrip our current ability to serve them. So they’re worried about the constraints on the grid.

Now, it’s possible that this could go in a few ways, one, that the demand is going to decrease or that these industries help bring online new sources of energy. But I think it’s pretty indisputable that the sheer demand for energy is really increasing. And that is not just ephemeral energy. That is coming from actual places, often in locales, possibly near people. So I think we’re going to see a lot of these showdowns more and more in the coming years, especially if companies place profit over community concerns.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Mm, yeah, well-said. Andrew, thanks so much for joining me today.

ANDREW CHOW: Thank you so much.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Andrew Chow is a technology correspondent at Time based in Washington, DC.

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