Can't see video below? Click here.
Tanya Thompson dusted every surface in her home for Easter Sunday. She had family coming to town — including 13 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
“I had a whole village,” she said with a laugh.
By Monday afternoon, when the Gulf States Newsroom visited Holly Ridge, Louisiana, to meet with people like Thompson, who heard about a community monitoring project the newsroom is conducting, a thin film of dust had already collected inside, on her tables and picture frames.
The dust is kicked up into the air from Hyperion, the Meta data center being built directly across the road.
Thompson recently recovered from a bad case of walking pneumonia. She’s sure her illness was caused or worsened by the dust she’s breathing in every day.
“You seen when a dust cloud goes, like in a desert?” she asked, trying to describe the plumes that can blanket the area. “That’s how bad it gets.”
When Hyperion is complete around 2030, Meta estimates the titanic facility will consume more than 23 million gallons of water per day to cool the server equipment housed inside — more than a town of 17,000 residents uses in a day. Holly Ridge has a population of fewer than 2,000.
Since construction began last year, Thompson and every resident the Gulf States Newsroom spoke with said they only drink bottled water.
They described the water that comes out of the faucet as having a “disinfectant” smell. And they said it can sometimes be “brown” or “like rust” when it comes out of the tap.
“I buy them by the gallons, and I buy two at a time — 40 bottles — and it’ll last me about a week,” Thompson said, standing in her kitchen, bottled water stacked next to her sink.
She said she’s never gotten a notice that her water isn’t safe to drink, even when it turns brown.
We also checked back in with residents who attended a small community meeting held a few weeks ago about putting air monitor devices outside their homes. People like Diane Cobb, who had just finished processing a wild hog and was dividing the meat between herself and a few neighbors. Living off the land, she said, is just a way of life in Holly Ridge.
“We always had a big garden, and we had either fish or deer,” she said.
She used to have a skinning rack that hung from a tree outside. Now, she and her neighbors process what they kill on a table inside.
“You can look up some days, and it just looks brown,” she said about the dust from Hyperion. “The air is brown.”
The name Amber Perez came up often in the community. She's a local independent journalist who started covering the Meta data center project — ironically writing about her findings on Facebook, the social media site owned by Meta.
She found a pattern: construction started, and trucks began rolling through town, causing chaos and crashes, with no prior warning. The project had been concealed by state officials who signed nondisclosure agreements.
"They just woke up one day, and there was an announcement of a data center," she said.
That lack of transparency, Perez said, extends to the air and water. That’s why she supports the idea of a monitoring project, she said, because it gives the community information they otherwise wouldn’t have.
"You have seen no politician come out here and say, ‘Let me test your air quality just to make sure that this project is safe.’"
The monitoring results will be analyzed by LSU researchers Dr. Adrienne Katner, who specializes in water quality, and Dr. Dan Harrington, who focuses on air quality.
Both have conducted similar projects before, including around the Denka synthetic rubber plant in St. John the Baptist Parish, where monitoring data led to official investigations and the suspension of toxic neoprene production.
“All of these things can help,” Kanter said. “These data can be leveraged, basically, to help the community, to give them a voice in the decision-making for their communities.”
Harrington noted that even if residents can't stop the data center, the data gives them options.
"If you have more knowledge about the air quality in and around your home, then you can take measures to reduce your own exposures without asking the government for help," he said.
A Louisiana law enacted in 2024 prohibits the use of community monitoring results to allege regulatory violations.
Anne Rolfes of Louisiana Bucket Brigade says the industry-backed law has a clear purpose: "A criminal does not want you to put in crime cameras. And that's exactly what we're seeing from industry in the state of Louisiana."
The Gulf States Newsroom consulted multiple lawyers before conducting this project, who confirmed it does not violate state law. The data is intended for non-regulatory applications, specifically to help communities understand local conditions and work toward solutions.
If you live in Holly Ridge 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. This report was produced with support from the Solutions Journalism Network Advancing Democracy Innovation Fund.
