Last October, Sawicky organized a week-long protest with the environmental activist group Greenpeace and displayed various anti-bitcoin signs to anyone who entered the Riot facility. Few other people were supportive, so Sawicky was devastated: “I couldn’t be more frustrated and disgusted with my fellow human beings,” he said, when we first spoke earlier this year.
Sawicky is unapologetically brash; he had given up artifice and trickery, he said, in favor of brute force. “It annoys me. I’m in your face,” he said. His methods have led even close allies to question him. “I love him to death. (But) he has an unfortunate knack for alienating people. man,” said John Blewitt, a friend of Sawicky’s who rarely attends TCAC events. But Sawicky insists that “hell-raising” is what’s needed to provoke a response.
While Standridge said the petition incident is not a reflection of the city’s attitude toward Sawicky, other local officials are open about their feelings about TCAC. “The protestors are sitting there in the front row and laughing the whole time. Like kids, they’re hardly allowed to speak,” said David Brewer, a commissioner at the Navarro County Commissioners Court, referring to the meet-and-greets. greetings held by Riot. “I know that no one in the county and city government pays any attention to them.”
But a few counties away, near the town of Granbury, a large bitcoin mine is already causing some of the problems Sawicky predicts are in store for Navarro County residents, should his warnings be ignored.
When I pull into Cheryl Shadden’s driveway Thursday afternoon, she bent over a plant bed bookended by two large flowering shrubs that framed the porch of her home. He turned to meet me, displaying on the front of his T-shirt, like Sawicky, a slogan in capital letters that read: “STOP BITCOIN!!” As I opened the car door, I was greeted by a noise: a slight hum and a slight rasp of wind.
In 2022, bitcoin mining company Compute North set up a facility adjacent to Shadden’s property, leasing land from the operator of a power plant already on the site. By the end of 2023, Shadden said, the noise emanating from the mine had become unbearable. “It’s like you’ve been attacked by aliens,” he said.
Shadden, a nurse anesthetist, has lived for 27 years in a small bungalow on a plot of land in Granbury, in Hood County, which consists of many fields and meadows separated by mesh fences. His life includes a full complement of animals, including cats, birds, horses, and a pack of enormous Great Pyrenees dogs.
On the day I visited, the whirring of the fans from the mine did not break Shadden’s walls; the phone app put the outside sound at about 70 decibels, similar to a vacuum cleaner. But on some days, Shadden and other locals say, the noise is worse. When the facility is at its strongest, some have to leave the vicinity. “My heart almost started pounding in my chest,” said Chip Joslin, incoming commissioner for nearby Somervell County.
Shadden attributes a range of health issues to noise exposure, including an inability to sleep, nausea, and ringing in his ears. At the end of June, Shadden was diagnosed with tinnitus and sensorineural hearing loss, a type of damage that can be caused by aging and exposure to noise. Other local residents report similar issues: “First it’s the ear, then it goes down after that. I have a headache now and my blood pressure is high … Listening to it makes me sick—the true,” said Geraldine Lathers, who lives in a neighborhood of bungalows adjacent to the facility.
