Residents of Fort Wayne, Indiana may have to say goodbye to over four acres of federally protected wetland — at least if Google has its way.
New reporting by local publication WANE revealed that a company called Hatchworks LLC, a data center developer for the tech giant, is looking to fill in several acres of federal wetlands as part of the third phase of “Project Zodiac,” a $2 billion hyperscale data center project.
As WANE reports, Hatchworks submitted an application to purchase 4.26 acres of forested wetland outside of Fort Wayne. Of that, about 2.13 acres of the land may soon be paved over to build three new buildings, as well as a labyrinth of waste water pipes and electrical infrastructure.
Granted, four acres isn’t the largest footprint in the world — that’s roughly the size of your average Walmart supercenter — but if the application proceeds, it would nonetheless see a private company hoovering up public land for the sake of wealth accumulation.
And if state authorities decide to go ahead with the data center campus, it would be permanently carving up a slice of Indiana’s all-important floodplains. These wetlands serve many valuable functions, not just as home for diverse plant and animal life, but also as a natural basin for rainwater, protecting nearby communities from flooding and soil erosion.
Much of the incoming data center campus would occupy a parcel of pre-paved farmland, likely geoengineered from its original wetland long ago. Rather than color within those lines, Google’s Hatchworks would rather stick to its original design plans, explaining in its filing with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management that it’s simply impossible to avoid shellacking the marshland.
“It was determined that meeting the project purpose and completely avoiding water resources was not feasible,” the filing reads. “Priority was placed upon avoiding as much of the large woodlots… as possible. Given these constraints, and the required layout and dimensions of the data center buildings, it is not possible to accommodate the development without impacts to the woodlot containing [the wetlands].”
The proposal will soon go to a virtual public hearing before it’s approved, though developers already have an anticipated start date of September 14. Given that previous phases of the Google campus are already completed, it’s hard to imagine Indiana officials will prevent the bulldozers from rolling in — though with enough public backlash, anything is possible.
More on data centers: Meta’s AI Data Center Caught Leaking Deadly Bacteria Into Water Town Uses for Irrigation
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