Last October, Sawicky organized a weeklong protest with environmental activist group Greenpeace, brandishing several anti-bitcoin signs at anyone entering Riot’s facility. Only a few others showed up in support, leaving Sawicky dejected: “I couldn’t have been more disappointed and disgusted for my fellow human beings,” she said when we first spoke earlier this year.
Sawicky is brazen and unapologetic about her brashness; she has forsaken guile and shrewdness, she claims, in favor of brute force. “I’m hateful. I’m in your face,” she says. Her methods have led even close allies to question her. “I love her to death.[But]she has an unfortunate knack for alienating people,” says John Blewitt, a friend of Sawicky’s who attends TCAC events infrequently. But Sawicky insists that “making a fuss” is what it takes to provoke a response.
While Standridge says the petition incident was not a reflection of the city’s attitude toward Sawicky, other local officials are open about their feelings about TCAC. “The protesters sit right there in the front row and boo the whole time. Like children, they’re barely allowed to speak,” says David Brewer, a commissioner on the Navarro County Commissioners Court, referring to the Riot-organized rallies. “I know that no one in county and city government is paying attention to them.”
But just a few counties away, near the town of Granbury, a large bitcoin mine is already causing some of the problems Sawicky predicts await Navarro County residents if his warnings are ignored.
When I threw On a Thursday afternoon, when I pulled into Cheryl Shadden’s driveway, she was leaning over a bed of plants bordered by two large flowering bushes that framed her front porch. She turned to greet me, and like Sawicky, on the front of her T-shirt was a slogan in capital letters that read, “STOP BITCOIN!” When I opened my car door, I was greeted by the noise: part hum, part gust of wind.
In 2022, bitcoin mining company Compute North set up a facility adjacent to Shadden’s property, which leases the land from the operator of a gas-fired power plant already on the site. Toward the end of 2023, Shadden says, the noise coming from the mine became unbearable. “It’s like you’ve been invaded by aliens,” he says.
Shadden, a registered nurse anesthetist, has lived for 27 years in a modest bungalow on a plot of land in Granbury, Hood County, made up of multiple fields and meadows separated by chain-link fences. She is joined by a menagerie of animals, including cats, birds, horses and a pack of enormous Great Pyrenees dogs.
On the day I visited the mine, the whirring of the fans did not penetrate Shadden’s walls; a phone app put the outside noise at about 70 decibels, similar to that of a vacuum cleaner. But some days, according to Shadden and other neighbors, the noise is much worse. When the facility is loudest, some have to leave the area. “My heart almost jumped out of my chest,” says Chip Joslin, the new commissioner of neighboring Somervell County.
Shadden attributes a range of health problems to noise exposure, including an inability to sleep, nausea and ringing in the ears. In late June, she was diagnosed with tinnitus and sensorineural hearing loss, a type of damage that can be caused by both aging and noise exposure. Other local residents report similar problems: “First it was the ringing in my ears, then it got worse. Now I have headaches and high blood pressure… Hearing it makes me sick, really sick,” says Geraldine Lathers, who lives in a bungalow neighborhood adjacent to the facility.