Your Business Climate
Living with mass hysteria
Ten sheds. Each one ten feet by sixty. Six thousand square feet total. At one end, an air exchanger about the size of what you’d see bolted to a refrigeration warehouse. Water consumption runs about five gallons a day. Three toilet flushes.
That’s the data center Rogersville organized itself into a frenzy over in support of nearby Marshfield, MO. It was like a pack of Yorkies running for the door after a light knock.
I keep coming back to those numbers because nothing about them justifies what happened. The town treated this thing like a giant Chucky with a knife. Half a Walmart is more invasive. A decent-sized dental practice uses more water. But the words “data center” landed, and the words did all the work. They screamed their power bills would go up. Huh? It’s ironic that when power was first proposed to this area decades ago, their ancestors protested that too.
And here’s the punchline. The data center will get built anyway, one town over in Marshfield, on the same power co-op grid. Rogersville and surrounded residents didn’t stop anything. They just made sure the jobs, the tax base, and the reputation went elsewhere.
“Data center” is just the latest entry in a vocabulary that’s been growing for thirty years. Toxins. Plume. Body burden. Bioaccumulation. Endocrine disruptor. Forever chemicals. In the soil, in the water, in the air, in breast milk. Detected in. Linked to. May cause. Could lead to.
If you actually tried to live by the warning label on every one of those words, you’d be sitting in an empty room eating nothing, and someone would still find a study suggesting the room itself was a problem.
I come from the generation that wasn’t afraid of its own shadow. The list keeps growing anyway, and the critical thinking that’s supposed to filter it keeps thinning out. When somebody warns me using the words “may,” “likely,” “someday,” or “linked to,” in any combination, my hand goes to my wallet. Those words mean the speaker doesn’t have the evidence to say “is.” If they had it, they’d use it. Cigarettes were once good for you. Margarine was the healthy choice. The list of things that turned out to be the opposite of the warning is long enough to fill its own post.
Anyone can call themselves a scientist or a researcher. The credential is doing less work than it used to, and the modifiers are doing more. They all have a horror story about a data center somewhere, yet when I chased a few down, they were mostly, no overwhelmingly exaggerated. It’s like bad nuclear. There is no such thing as good nuclear, ever. Even though there is good nuclear that solves the entire power problem.
Here’s what bothers me about Rogersville specifically. The data center wasn’t really the issue. The data center was the audition. This was all to gain a political foothold in the community. This place is for the purposes of medical research. There is no cheering that on either.
Communities get exactly one shot at this kind of thing, and the rest of the country is watching how they handle it. Six thousand square feet of sheds and five gallons of water a day is the lowest-stakes infrastructure decision a town will ever face. If that’s the one that breaks them, nobody serious is going to bring the next one. I won’t. This is just too brain dead for me.
The people who screamed loudest will, a decade from now, look at the towns that said yes and wonder how they ended up on the wrong side of every chart. They won’t connect it back to a shed they fought in 2026. But that’s where it started.
Data centers are just the latest two bad words. There’ll be a new two next year. Rogersville has been a planning disaster for as long as it’s had plans. This was just the most recent installment. The towns that learn to tell the difference will do fine. The ones that don’t, won’t.
The fact that I won’t flinch over the mass hysteria puts me on the wrong side of the issue, but I’ve been there many times and I’m okay with it. Getting it right matters to me.
I know it doesn’t seem all that connected to all you readers out there, but this thinking is coming to a community near you and it harms all of us. Like it or not, data centers are a very critical part of our future and some are about to find out just how critical.