In McCalla, Alabama, out where the Appalachian foothills yawn and stretch before coming to rest further south in fields of ripening cotton, there’s a lake where David Havron used to swim. He was little more than a boy then, topping the crests in his red Chevrolet with his dog riding shotgun beside him. A few years back, David bought a house not far from the place. “It just felt to me like ‘this is home’,” he says. Now in his 70s, David has the sinewy look of a man who has not known much idle time. Yet standing with him in his yard, it’s not hard to imagine him in his younger days: on a certain kind of morning, when the Dog Star is rising and the sun is restless in the Southern sky, you can almost see him out there on the lake — a skinny kid gazing up at Longleaf pine trees, his dog paddling in the near distance.
David is a collector of things. In the office of his white-brick house, there are shelves lined with hand-crank pencil sharpeners, Second World War relics, and all sorts of ephemera. In recent months, however, David has become a collector of a different sort. He’s become a collector of concerns. He’s among the hundreds of residents within striking distance of the proposed site of the Bessemer Hyperscale Data Center, also known as “Project Marvel”. Backed by developer Logistics Land Investment LLC, the $14.5 billion project’s campus includes nearly 700 wooded acres near a smattering of houses and two residential neighbourhoods — Rock Mountain Lakes and Red Mountain Heights. As it stands, the development is projected to include 18 data centre buildings, each approximately 250,000 sq. ft., on roughly 100 acres of clear-cut land. If the project advances, it will be one of the largest hyperscale data centres in the United States.
Residents are worried about what the resource-hungry facility might do to their rural community. As president of the Rock Mountain Lakes Landowner’s Association, David’s been getting a lot of calls about it. “We’re talking about people’s lives here,” he says, “and this is just not right.” McCalla is close-knit. Red Mountain Heights is what locals call a “legacy” community. That is, a community of families who’ve lived on the same land, often in the same houses, for generations. It’s a point of pride for those who live there. It demands respect from those who don’t.
In recent years, the race to develop artificial intelligence and the surge in cloud computing has led to massive data centre expansion across the United States, with tech giants vying for inexpensive land and abundant power and water sources for their operations. According to industry advocates, the number of data centres that suffuse the American landscape has soared over the last decade. As demand skyrockets, state and local governments compete for projects they hope will fuel economic booms.
Meanwhile, grassroots resistance to unchecked growth is on the rise. In Memphis, locals are trying to shut down an xAI facility powered by turbines they say are polluting the air in a historically black community that already suffers high rates of respiratory illness. A couple in Georgia told reporters their water taps went dry after Meta broke ground on a $750 million development in Newton County. In suburban northern Virginia, where the massive warehouses have become a fixture of everyday life, citizens complain that the developments are encroaching on neighbourhoods and homes at an alarming rate. In Prince William County, locals have even coalesced to try to change local ordinances and put an end to the incessant low-grade roar produced by data centre cooling systems.
In Alabama, residents in McCalla and in the City of Bessemer are united against Project Marvel. “We might be fighting an uphill battle,” David says, “but we’re going to fight it to the very end.” Locals have spent months pouring over academic reports and technical documents, trying to understand how data centres have been received in other communities and what risks might attend the development. They’ve also built a substantial coalition of allies in opposition to the project location, if not to the project itself, including Jefferson County Commission President Jimmie Stephens, State Representative Leigh Hulsey, and a wide range of environmental and other public advocacy organisations.
At the core of local concerns about the proposal is a lack of transparency and, now, trust. The project site is at the razor’s edge of Bessemer. Those most likely to be impacted — including adjacent landowners — are in unincorporated Jefferson County and thus lack substantial political representation in Bessemer’s government. Meanwhile, Mayor Kenneth E. Gulley, along with his chief of staff and the city’s attorney, have signed non-disclosure agreements with the developer. In April, Mayor Gulley told local reporters it’s an approach he’s taken before. “Every time I’ve recruited projects to this city,” he said, “I’ve signed an NDA.” (Requests for further comment were not returned by the Mayor’s office.)
With public officials staying silent, many of the proposal’s key features remain unknown. The developer has not yet revealed an end user, leaving the nearby communities to wonder who their corporate neighbour might be. Meanwhile, details about power and water consumption and usage, wastewater management, potential harms to endangered species, and broader environmental impacts are sparse.
What is known is that hyperscale data centres are wildly resource intensive, requiring enormous amounts of energy and water to store and process information around the clock. A report released by the Department of Energy last year suggests that data processing centres consumed about 4.4% of total US electricity in 2023 and could consume up to 12% of total US electricity by 2028. At the same time, cooling systems that are necessary to reduce heat generated by servers can demand millions of gallons of water daily — and that’s not including water used in power generation. Increasingly, groundwater pumping is being used by data centres, particularly in places where municipal water is scarce, expensive, or regulated. In McCalla, that possibility has raised concerns about dry residential and agricultural wells, diminished waterways, and devastated ecosystems.
According to public documents obtained by Inside Climate News, the Bessemer data centre campus is projected to consume roughly 10.5 million megawatt hours of energy per year at full scale. That would increase Alabama’s total annual energy output by about 10%. Meanwhile, correspondence between the Warrior River Water Authority and the developer suggests daily water usage could reach two million gallons, requiring major infrastructure upgrades before demand could conceivably be met.
“This project is going to be a massive water user… and a massive wastewater user,” says Black Warrior Riverkeeper Nelson Brooke. “This isn’t just going to affect the local community, it’s going to affect Little Blue Creek, Five Mile Creek, Blue Creek, and the Black Warrior River downstream… Given the lack of transparency, it’s premature to be pushing this thing forward. We don’t know what impact it’s going to have on our water resources. That’s a big deal.”
Experts are also concerned about the risk that Project Marvel might pose to wildlife, including a newly discovered species of freshwater fish called the Birmingham darter. The colourful creature is already “critically imperilled”, scientists say. Development of the site could destroy one of the fish’s few remaining habitats. “The darter has been there for millions of years,” Havron says. “And it has survived. God has put those… all these critters here. Do they really want that to be their legacy?”
At present, the city of Bessemer is considering a request from Logistics Land Investment LLC to rezone the prospective project site from agricultural to light industrial, a necessary step before the developer applies for any obligatory state and federal permits. Already, the project has met road blocks. The Bessemer City Planning and Zoning Commission voted in March to recommend rezoning and preliminary site plan approval to the City Council, but following a lawsuit from some residents alleging that Alabama’s legal notice requirements were not met, the Jefferson County Circuit Court ordered officials to restart the process. The Commission reconvened in June, voting 4-2 to reaffirm its recommendations.
Public officials hope that Project Marvel will transform the city’s economy. “The Marvel City”, as Bessemer is called, earned its nickname as a post-Reconstruction steel boomtown and sometimes competitor with nearby Birmingham. But decades of deindustrialisation, job losses, and disinvestment have taken a toll. The data centre campus’s proponents believe Project Marvel can help turn things around. In addition to the enormous capital investment, proponents say that the project could create hundreds of temporary construction jobs, as well as some permanent roles in operations and maintenance.
That said, Alabama offers extensive tax incentives for data processing centres, including up to 30 years of abatement for non-educational property taxes. The state also allows the abatement of a portion of the sales and use tax on construction materials and equipment and other capitalised costs for some projects. That could significantly limit the amount of public revenue the project could generate. The city could negotiate a Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) agreement or other compensatory revenue mechanism, but non-disclosure agreements make it impossible for the public to establish whether it has done so.
Attorney Martin Evans, who represents the developer, has urged public officials to focus on potential economic benefits at this stage in the process. Environmental and other community concerns, he said, would ultimately be addressed by existing law, as well as by engineers and state and federal regulators. “What you’re dealing with this morning with this proposal is whether this is good for the city, and it most certainly is,” he explained in June. “This project is going to take a large piece of raw land next to the interstate and put it to productive use.”
For some locals, that land is hallowed ground. Marshall Killingsworth, aged 80, has lived beside it for more than half his life. He bought the place because its then-dirt road reminded him of his childhood on a North Chilton County farm. On a Thursday morning in midsummer, he stood on the back patio looking over the yard. “See there?” He points up at the treeline. “That’s where they want to put it.” Without some guidance, it would be impossible to tell where Marshall’s property ends and the projected development site begins. The whole landscape is a kaleidoscope of luxuriant greens. Fuchsia blossoms hang in delicate clusters from crape myrtle trees. Hummingbirds hover at feeders. Marshall and his wife have spent years building themselves a private Eden. “You see,” he instructs, “this is what these folks just can’t seem to understand. God has given us a paradise here in this country. Alabama is a paradise. We have been incredibly blessed.”
Marshall has been one of the proposal’s most outspoken critics. He believes that his boldness is due to some combination of adversity and divine intervention. Between his junior and senior years of college, there was an accident at the paper mill where he then worked. It mangled his hand and claimed four of his fingers. Back then, Marshall was playing basketball to get through college. He thought those dreams were over. “I want you to understand this, because this is how God works,” he tells me in a near-whisper. “My coach worked with me, we made some adjustments, and I played my senior year of college. And I graduated.” The family farm, the basketball court, the little brick house, and the backyard — a long straight line.
Before the Planning and Zoning Commission’s June meeting, Marshall hatched a plan to mount a one-man protest in front of City Hall. He brought with him a black homemade sign that read in huge block letters “MAYOR GULLEY, TALK TO THE PEOPLE” and below “DATA CENTERS KILL”. The thought, he says, was to sit with the sign to get a conversation going, and then to take it with him when he left at day’s end. It didn’t work out that way. Film footage captured by journalist Lee Hedgepeth shows police surrounding Marshall. “The City of Bessemer ordinance says you can’t post signs in front of the city hall,” an officer can be heard telling him. Not long after, the video shows Bessemer Police Sergeant Gantman Hoof arriving and ordering Marshall to remove the sign. When Marshall asks which ordinance the officers are referring to, Sergeant Hoof motions to the others to remove the sign. “I’ll do it,” Marshall says, reaching out toward the sergeant’s arm in appeal. The sergeant steps away. “Don’t touch me!” he says. “OK sir, you just want to talk, but I’m just asking you to take this sign down, or we’re going to take it down for you.” (The Bessemer Police Department did not return requests for comment.)
A month later, the Bessemer City Council held a public hearing about the prospective data centre. Attendees say they were confronted with signage of a different sort. Posted outside the meeting and around the dais were posters with messages including “let’s talk facts” and “powered by knowledge, not fear”. The signs were marked with a city hall emblem.
Before the hearing began in earnest, council president Donna Thigpen told the packed room she wanted to set some ground rules for public participation. “You can come to the mic and speak for two minutes and then your time will be done,” she announced. “We don’t want anyone repeating what the last person said. For instance, I don’t want four people coming up and saying ‘you need to vote no’. Give us the reason.” Though the Councilwoman told the audience that anyone would be welcome to speak, she reiterated her directive against repetition at least three times during the public comment portion of the hearing.
Midway through the public comment period, Eric Pippens walked to the podium. Eric wore a red button-up shirt in solidarity with others who oppose the data centre development. “This project may benefit outside corporations, but it will come at the direct expense of the families who live here,” he told councillors. “We have decades of people here who have lived in this community with no bother,” he went on. “I moved back. How many of you can say you went back to your community and built there — looking, and searching, and knowing that you have a place for your family to be raised and continue? We have been a pillar in the community.”
Marshall was among the last to speak at July’s public hearing. He spent his time talking about creation, man’s relationship with God, and the responsibility of stewardship. “Though he slay me, yet will I trust Him.” Marshall quoted from the book of Job. The room was silent. Before he could finish his point, the buzzer rang out. His two minutes had expired. “Let me just say this,” Marshall pleaded, “Second Samuel says two men were in a city. One was rich and one was poor. The rich man took the poor man’s lamb, which he cherished tremendously, he cherished tremendously… I ask you here today, please don’t take our lamb. There are other locations for this facility. I ask you: pause. Consider what you’re doing.”
At the end of the hearing, the Bessemer City Council delayed its vote on the data centre proposal. It will meet again in mid-August to consider whether to move forward with it.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Farahn Morgan
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://unherd.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
