Erin Brockovich has found a sequel. The legal activist, made famous by Julia Roberts in the 2000 film bearing her name, recently described America’s data center boom as “Hinkley on fricking steroids.” Her new website tracks data centers alongside anonymously submitted complaints about water, electricity, noise, and utility bills. The script writes itself: another environmental catastrophe is unfolding, and Erin Brockovich is here to expose it.
The legal case that made her famous involved groundwater in Hinkley, California, contaminated with hexavalent chromium. Residents were awarded a $333 million settlement. A data center is not a toxic-waste site. It is an industrial warehouse full of servers whose principal byproduct is heat. It’s true that data centers can impose costs on a community without adequate planning for power, water, or ratepayer protections. Some data centers use gas turbines, which are loud and annoying. Communities have complained about power lines going over their neighborhoods. Those are infrastructure failures but not evidence of impending environmental disaster.
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