Zeros

Five Years Down Ben Hill Road Somewhere over the rainbow, Summer Moon Utah Wells is still five years old. Five years ago this June , a little girl in a pink shirt and gray pants walked out of a house on Ben Hill Road in Hawkins County, Tennessee , and did not come back. She was five years old . Her name was Summer Moon Utah Wells , and she would be ten years old right now . She would be finishing fourth grade. She would know how to read. She would have a best friend and a favorite song and an opinion about things. She would have gone to school. I have been following this case since the day it broke — June 15, 2021 — when the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation issued an Endangered Child Alert that escalated into a statewide AMBER Alert within twelve hours. I have five years of YouTube history to document it. This case is, frankly, the reason I started watching True Crime content at all. And I say that not to center myself in a child's tragedy, but to explain what dra...

When the Grid Becomes a Target: Appalachia Rewind When communities feel steamrolled by industrial buildouts they never asked for, what happens next? And could infrastructure incidents near contested development zones be more than coincidence? West Virginia is ground zero for that tension right now. Gov. Patrick Morrisey and the West Virginia DEP have been pushing hard toward a data center buildout, backed by House Bill 2014, passed in April 2025, which prohibits counties and municipalities from enforcing or adopting regulations that limit high-impact data center projects . [ West Virginia Gazette Mail ]  In Tucker County, a Virginia company called Fundamental Data applied for an air quality permit for what it's calling the Ridgeline Facility — a natural gas power plant and data center complex proposed to be built between the tourist towns of Thomas and Davis, covering potentially 10,000 acres . [ West Virginia Watch ]  Residents there created a grassroots coal...

When the Data Center Moves In and the Water Follows Residents along University Lane in Mason County, West Virginia didn't sign up to be a cautionary tale. But that's where they landed on the weekend of May 23rd , when a construction site for the Monarch Compute Campus — a data center initiative between AI company Nscale and energy infrastructure firm Fidelis New Energy [ MSN ] — contributed to severe flooding that damaged their homes. Site manager Jason Bechtle acknowledged that the storm dropped roughly a month's worth of rain in two days, and that while the site's stormwater measures had passed inspection the prior week , a stretch of silt fence gave way under the volume of water. [ The Cool Down ] The company said it would cover cleanup and repair costs. That's something, at least . But one resident noted the damage started earlier than the flood — during tree clearing, he says workers took down 12 to 15 trees on his property . [ WCHS ]  The floo...

Digital Currency & Mining Policy:  Hawkins County Tried to Stop a Bitcoin Mine. Now They're Being Sued. Last week, we covered Washington County's five-year fight to shut down a noisy Bitcoin operation — a fight they eventually won through a 2023 lawsuit settlement that finally took effect. This week, we find out what happens when the county next door tries to head that problem off before it starts. The answer, predictably, is a federal lawsuit. Hawkins County commissioners voted 10-2 in September 2025 to ban cryptocurrency mining and data center operations outright, citing noise, power consumption, infrastructure burden, and what the resolution called an incompatibility with the county's rural character. Residents near the proposed site — within 1,000 feet of homes and a church — showed up in force. Dairy farmers raised specific concerns about noise affecting milk production in their herds. The vote was decisive. The room erupted in cheers. The cheering di...