The Cloud Is Not Silent

This excerpt was taken from a scientific article, "Popular Science" "Inside the physical footprint of the Cloud."
It describes the noise pollution factor on members of the community who live close to a Hyperscale Datacenter.
Its a bit wordy, but very informative, and honestly a bit scary. I realize the need for datacenters, but as this article stresses, NOT NEAR residential areas, and certainly should not be a mile from a school. Dear Peculiar Board Members and Staff, please read this, and tell me how you would justify that money is more important than lives.

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Over vast distances, the sonic exhaust of our digital lives reverberates: the minute vibrations of hard disks, the rumbling of air chillers, the cranking of diesel generators, the mechanical spinning of fans. Data centers emit acoustic waste, what environmentalists call “noise pollution.” For communities like Brenda’s and David’s, the computational whir of data centers is not merely an annoyance, but a source of mental and physical harm. Brenda, a nurse by training, reported an uptick in her blood pressure and cortisol levels with the onset of the noise. David, a twenty-something software engineer, was diagnosed with hypertension, and meets frequently with a clinical therapist to manage the anxiety caused by the data center’s hum.

Their stories are cautionary tales; they are neither uncommon nor exceptional. The acute and longitudinal physiological effects of industrial noise pollution are well-documented to include hearing loss, elevated stress hormones like cortisol, hypertension, and insomnia. Brenda and David met with other disaffected residents in their respective communities to organize for change. Brenda soon joined the Dobson Noise Coalition, helping to organize a community meeting with her neighbors, city officials, state and federal representatives, and employees of CyrusOne, the offending data center. David took a stand with others in his building, successfully mobilizing the Chicago Department of Public Health to file a noise complaint on their behalf and successfully obtain a hearing for a noise pollution violation. While the efforts of these communities to minimize the noise pollution harming them are ongoing, they are resigned to modest goals to improve rather than solve the problem. Unlike other industries, data centers are largely self-regulating: There is no sweeping federal agency to govern the siting and operation of new and existing facilities.
Because data center noise is unregulated by political authorities, facilities can be built in close proximity to residential communities. Given the subjective nature of hearing, the history of noise regulation might best be characterized by a series of contests over expertise and the “right” to quiet, as codified in liberal legal regimes. Over the course of my fieldwork with the communities of Chandler and Printer’s Row, I learned that the “noise” of the Cloud uniquely eludes regulatory schemes. In many cases, the loudness of the data centers, as measured in decibels (dB), falls below the threshold of intolerance as prescribed by local ordinances. For this reason, when residents contacted the authorities to intervene, to attenuate or quiet their noise, no action was taken, because the data centers had not technically violated the law, and their properties were zoned for industrial purposes. However, upon closer interrogation of the sound, some residents reported that the monotonal drone, a frequency hovering within the range of human speech, is particularly disturbing, given the attuned sensitivity of human ears to discern such frequencies above others. Even so, there were days when the data centers, running diesel generators, vastly exceeded permissible decibel-thresholds for noise. As with water and carbon, local companies like CyrusOne pledged in community meetings to take steps to attenuate their sound, though these were unenforceable promises that, to date, they have failed to keep.