EASTERN PANHANDLE, W.Va. — Over and over on a recent October Saturday, Jenny Thacker explained to voters in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle why the groundwater in the region is particularly susceptible to contamination from data centers. Thacker was nine months into her campaign to flip a House of Delegates seat for Democrats in deeply conservative West Virginia. Data centers have been “the number one issue people have talked to me about,” she said.
By that Saturday, with just over two weeks until the election, she had her explanation of the region’s groundwater issues down pat. Thacker, an ocean cartographer who retired several years ago from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), navigated her Prius from a homecoming parade to a garden group lunch to a barbecue fundraiser for a local 4-H group. Her bumper stickers hinted at the priorities that have defined her life: “May The Forest Be With You,” “Tree Hugger,” “Save The Ash Trees,” and “Peace Corps: Proud To Have Served My Country.” At the 4-H fundraiser — where a plate of pork barbecue, baked beans and mac ‘n’ cheese was $10 — Thacker used her hands to show Debbie Morris, 66, how cracks in the region’s bedrock act as chutes that carry water quickly from the surface to the underground water table.
If that surface water has the chemical pollutants in it that data centers use to cool their equipment, they end up in the groundwater, and boiling the water only concentrates the chemicals, Thacker explained. And as data centers extract groundwater to use for cooling systems, they can quickly use up entire pockets of water. Thacker’s district is in Jefferson County, where as much as 90 percent of the population relies on municipal or private wells.
Voters have told Thacker that some of their wells are already running dry. Drilling a new one — assuming they can locate a water pocket in the bedrock — can come with a $25,000 price tag. As Thacker ate a plate of barbecue, Morris nodded along, periodically stopping to accept treats for safekeeping from her tutu-attired granddaughter.
Morris met Thacker months earlier and said she has been impressed by her campaign, which has included hundreds of drop-ins to speak with voters at community events like this one. It’s a smart crowd, and they’ve supported her with open arms,” Morris said. The two women discussed a law enacted last year that, as GOP Gov.
Patrick Morrisey put it, took away local oversight and created a state-level “one-stop shop” for data-center permitting. West Virginia’s counties and municipalities are now legally barred from enforcing local ordinances and land-use rules related to microgrid sites or high-impact data centers. When the state legislature, which has a GOP supermajority, voted on the legislation, only three Republicans in the House of Delegates defected from their party to vote against it.
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