In October, Sawicky organized a week-long protest with the environmental activist group Greenpeace, waving various anti-Bitcoin signs at anyone entering the Riot facility. Only a few other people showed up in support, which depresses Sawicky: “I couldn’t be more disappointed and disgusted for my fellow humans,” she said when we first spoke earlier this year.
Sawicki is brazenly brazen; she says she has forsaken cunning and guile for brute force. “I’m repulsive. I’m pushy,” she says. Her methods have caused even close allies to question her. “I love her to death. [But] has an unfortunate knack for alienating people,” says John Blewitt, a friend of Sawicky’s who rarely attends TCAC events. But Sawicky says “raising hell” is what’s needed to provoke a reaction.
While Standridge said the petition incident was not a reflection of the city’s attitude toward Sawicky, other local officials have been open about their feelings about TCAC. “The protesters are sitting there, in the front row, and they’re constantly harassing people. They’re like kids, they’re not allowed to talk,” says David Brewer, a commissioner on the Navarro County Commissioners Court, referring to Riot’s social gatherings. “I know nobody in the county or city government pays attention to them.”
But a few counties away, near the town of Granbury, a immense bitcoin mining operation is already creating problems that Sawicky predicts Navarro County residents could face if her warnings are ignored.
When I pulled On Thursday afternoon, Cheryl Shadden pulled into her driveway, leaning over a flower bed flanked by two immense flowering shrubs that framed her front porch. She turned to greet me, revealing on the front of her T-shirt, like Sawicky, the slogan in all caps: “STOP BITCOIN!!” When I opened my car door, I heard a noise: part hum, part gust of wind.
In 2022, bitcoin mining company Compute North set up an object adjacent to the Shadden property, leasing the land from the operator of a gas-fired power station already there. By delayed 2023, Shadden says, the noise from the mine had become unbearable. “It’s like you’ve been invaded by aliens,” he says.
Shadden, a nurse anesthesiologist, has lived for 27 years in a modest bungalow on a plot of land in Granbury, Hood County, that is divided by chain-link fences. She has a menagerie of animals, including cats, birds, horses and a pack of giant Great Pyrenees.
On the day I visited, the noise of the mine’s fans didn’t penetrate Shadden’s walls; a phone app pegged the outside sound at about 70 decibels, like a vacuum cleaner. But some days, Shadden and other residents say, the noise is much worse. When the facility is at its loudest, some are forced to leave the area. “My heart starts pounding in my chest,” says Chip Joslin, the fresh commissioner of neighboring Somervell County.
Shadden attributes a range of health problems to noise exposure, including insomnia, nausea and ringing in her ears. In delayed June, Shadden was diagnosed with tinnitus and sensorineural hearing loss, a type of hearing loss that can be caused by both aging and noise exposure. Other residents have reported similar problems: “First it was ringing in my ears, and then it started getting worse. Now I have headaches and high blood pressure… Listening to it makes me sick — really sick,” says Geraldine Lathers, who lives in a bungalow next to the center.