The previous October, Sawicky organized a weeklong protest alongside environmental activist group Greenpeace and brandished various anti-bitcoin signs at anyone who entered the Riot facility. Only a few other people turned out in support, leaving Sawicky dejected: “I could not have been more disappointed and disgusted by my fellow humans,” she said, when we first spoke earlier in the year.
Sawicky is unapologetically brash; she has given up on artfulness and guile, she claims, in favor of brute force. “I am obnoxious. I am 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 who attends TCAC events infrequently. But Sawicky insists that “raising hell” is what it takes to provoke a response.
Though Standridge says the petition incident was not a reflection of the city’s attitude toward Sawicky, other local officials are open in their feelings about TCAC. “The protesters sit right there in the front row and heckle the whole time. Just like children, they won’t hardly let them speak,” says David Brewer, a commissioner in the Navarro County Commissioners Court, referring to the meet-and-greets held by Riot. “I know that nobody in the county and city government is paying 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 that Sawicky predicts are in store for the residents of Navarro County, should her warnings be ignored.
When I pulled into Cheryl Shadden’s driveway on a Thursday afternoon, she was bending over a plant bed bookended by two large flowering shrubs that framed the porch of her home. She turned to greet me, revealing on the front of her T-shirt, like Sawicky, a slogan in capital letters that read: “STOP BITCOIN!!” As I swung open the car door, I was met with the noise: part hum and part rush of wind.
In 2022, the bitcoin mining company Compute North set up a facility adjacent to Shadden’s property, leasing the land from the operator of a gas power plant already on the site. Toward the end of 2023, Shadden claims, the noise spilling from the mine became unbearable. “It’s like you’ve been invaded by aliens,” she says.
Shadden, a nurse anesthetist, has lived for 27 years in a modest bungalow on a plot of land in Granbury, in Hood County, made up of multiple fields and meadows separated by mesh fences. With her lives a full menagerie 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 breach Shadden’s walls; a phone app placed the outside sound at roughly 70 decibels, similar to a vacuum cleaner. But on some days, Shadden and other locals say, the noise is far worse. When the facility is at its loudest, some have to leave the vicinity. “My heart almost starts beating out of my chest,” says Chip Joslin, incoming commissioner for neighboring Somervell County.
Shadden attributes a range of health issues to the noise exposure, including an inability to sleep, nausea, and a ringing in her ears. At the end of June, Shadden 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 issues: “First it was the ear-ringing, then it went downhill after that. I have headaches now and high blood pressure … Listening to it makes me sick—actually sick,” says Geraldine Lathers, who lives in a neighborhood of bungalows adjacent to the facility.