A few of Diane Cobb’s deviled eggs were already missing before the meeting even started.
She’d invited all her neighbors in Holly Ridge, Louisiana, to talk about a community monitoring project to find out how Meta’s Hyperion data center across the street is affecting the air they breathe and the water they drink.
A handful showed up, including her best friend, Robin Williams — the egg-thief.
The rest, she said, figured: “What's the point?”
That question, like the brown clouds of dust and diesel exhaust from the thousands of dump trucks that now rumble past the elementary school, past front porches, past the shuttered Thompson’s store where Miss Bessie Thompson used to keep the ice cream freezer by the door and cook breakfast for the farmers and let the schoolchildren in for a dime cone, hangs over the community.
Across the road is what will be Hyperion — Meta’s $27 billion data center.
The titanic facility will consume three times the electricity that the city of New Orleans uses in a year and chug millions of gallons of water a day to cool its massive data servers that power the company’s artificial intelligence.
Cobb is 82 years old — her birthday was the day before the meeting. She’s been here since 1961, when she met and married a Navy man from these parts and followed him home.
Back then, Thompson’s store was the center of everything. People gathered there to watch the World Series — it was the first place in town to get a TV. On election day, voting booths were brought in.
Now, it sits empty on Highway 183, a for-rent sign nailed to a post, dump trucks thundering past all day.
"It's not Holly Ridge anymore," Cobb said. "It really isn't."
Cobb found out about the data center the way everyone else in Holly Ridge did.
One day, they just started digging.
"Nobody told us anything," she said. "They supposedly had a big meeting. The whole community was supposed to come. Nobody knew anything about it. Ever."
When the project was announced in December 2024, Gov. Jeff Landry said it would bring jobs and progress. Meta said the data center would help build “the future of human connection.”
In Diane Cobb’s living room, residents wanted to know why their water sometimes turns brown, why their electricity has been shutting off without any notice, sometimes for days at a time, why their roads are so dangerous — and why everyone seems to have gotten sicker since Meta showed up.
People in Holly Ridge feel like they’ve been kept in the dark.
“You can't get information,” said Joe Williams, who lives across from the Meta site, “and they did not send no letters out, no nothing before they ever started this.”
“No one come knocked on our door,” his wife, Robin, added.
These are questions the Gulf States Newsroom hopes to answer — to find out what residents want to know by monitoring and testing the air, water and dust.
The closest Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality air monitoring site is in Monroe, 30 miles away — too far to have any idea what people are breathing in.
"Anything that would help us understand what's going on," Cobb said, "is just a big help."
If you live in Holly Ridge or Richland Parish and are interested in participating in the community environmental monitoring project, you can fill out this form here.
Or contact Drew Hawkins at drew@gulfstatesnewsroom.org
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR. Support for public health coverage comes from The Commonwealth Fund.
