By: Laura Love, love.laura.j@gmail.com
Long-lived lineages weaving through Black, white and Indigenous families and a gentle abundance of green flowing everywhere were the first impressions of Rockingham and Richmond County that I had thanks to Shaun Ingram. We were on a tour organized by the Richmond Coalition for Justice and Black Empowerment led by Ingram, one of its co-directors. They had taken us out before the DEQ hearing on July 15 for the air permits required before the AWS data center could come to the county. Love and respect Ingram has for the county, land and people therein and wanted us to understand why and what it looks like. It was clear early on that there were not many economic opportunities for the residents and became clear that the land, like its residents, did not have many opportunities for regeneration, just more extraction.
As we drove toward Hamlet, the site of the AWS data center, we passed by the massive Vulcan Materials Company open pit mine, so large that the quarry trucks on the other side of the mine looked less than an inch big. Ingram’s father, Arthur Ingram, talked about his days driving trucks for the quarry and the tremendous volume of water used for washing the minerals dug up from the ground, also water used by the Marcal Paper Company to make paper towels and how the sludge it produced would make its way to Hitch Creek and onto the Pee Dee River. Added to that is the Laurel Paper Company plus Beaver’s Pavers and International Tie Disposal, companies which make and repurpose railroad ties, products which use creosote, a highly toxic insect and rotting repellant. Detritus from the ties also make their way to the river.
In his youth Ingram went fishing in the Pee Dee River. Now he can’t, not only is the river environmentally unsafe, corporations have closed off access, in turn closing off ancestral land. Soon to be added to the river’s strain will be the 800-acre data center facility, with its thousands if not millions of water guzzling per day.
Soon we arrived at the AWS parcel, previously zoned agricultural, not heavy industry. Relatives gone by lay underneath the land and no one in the developers respected this Ingram taught us.
Driving by we saw the Duke Energy facility on one side of the field on the other side, in the AWS parcel, construction crews and construction materials. It was just a regular day at work building more of the AWS data center (some slabs were already laid). This AWS center cannot operate without the electricity of the 594 backup generators and it is applying for an air permit for that day. So it leads to the question everybody in the van had, is the fix already in? Is the hearing this evening all a show to assuage the public?
We returned back to town where the press conference and hearing were to take place. I wondered how much environmental harm Richmond County can take.
