Lady Of the HVAC
25.8K posts
Locals kept telling me how the old access point at Pond Creek got washed away, forcing them to drive up the road, turn around, and loop back just to use this shiny new bridge. It’s a daily hassle, and they’ve begged county officials to fix it. So I went over there myself. Standing there looking at that massive, expensive bridge and all the new infrastructure dropped into this washed-out, impoverished stretch of Pike County, I thought: why here, of all places? Then it clicked…the whole area sits on a huge deposit of Fire Clay tied to the region’s coal seams, one of the richest concentrations of rare earth elements in the eastern U.S., exactly the critical resources desperately needed for the magnets, chips, and power infrastructure feeding the data center and AI boom. While they were drilling and excavating for the bridge, the pre-bid minutes openly discuss the potential for landslides, admitting the slope on the west side already had “breaks from sliding now.” They knew the risks and kept digging anyway. Then February 2020: massive mudslide buries the CSX tracks near Pond Creek, ethanol train derails, and poison spills into the river just miles from the Mountain Water District sub-pump at Marrowbone. Of course Kentucky officials blamed it all on “natural weather” and covered it up. Now industrial parks, solar projects, and data center plans are sprouting all around this same excavation while the environment takes another hit.
This is extremely concerning! A new study found that the sweetener used in millions of Americans' daily snacks can damage human brain cells within hours of a single serving. The FDA approved it decades ago, but the new data is worrying: (1/15)
