Dowagiac community forum on data center noise lawsuit amid facility expansion

Dozens of Dowagiac residents packed a meeting room built for 50 people at the city's public library Tuesday evening, taking turns rotating in and out as attorneys handling a class-action data center noise lawsuit answered questions about the case. The informational session, hosted by Detroit-based class-action law firm Liddle Sheets, P.C., comes about a month after the suit was filed in the U.S. District Court on May 26 and just four days after the company behind the facility, Hyperscale Data, Inc., announced a major expansion. The lawsuit alleges the facility’s noise physically invades neighboring properties under a common-law nuisance theory and currently seeks damages on behalf of residents within a mile of the site, an area the complaint says includes roughly 1,300 homes. Neither Dowagiac Mayor Patrick Bakeman, City Manager Kevin Anderson nor any other city officials attended Tuesday’s forum. Still, the meeting's turnout was recognized by residents and lawyers alike. “This is a hell of a turnout for the first meeting,” attorney Steve Liddell, founding partner of Liddell Sheets, P.C., said to the crowd. Liddle, estimating around 100 people came through the room over the course of the day, said his firm has already collected a comparable number of completed data forms from affected residents before the meeting even began. He said the size of the crowd helps support what’s known in class-action law as “numerosity,” the legal threshold showing there are too many affected people to sue individually. Residents used a range of words to describe the sound coming from the facility, which opened in 2022, including "whining," "annoying," and "invasive." Some described it as a low, constant vibration that they feel, rather than just hear. One resident, Glenda Phillips, who moved to Dowagiac full-time from Atlanta about six-and-a-half years ago, said she began noticing an “annoying buzz that just wouldn’t quit” roughly two years after moving in. “There are days that, after about the third or fourth day of your head kind of reverberating, it runs me inside,” Phillips said. Phillips told News Channel 3 at the meeting that she has experienced more frequent migraines in recent years and wonders whether the noise is the reason. "It definitely takes...kind of the healing and reclusiveness out of things some days," Phillips said. News Channel 3 has asked Bakeman and Anderson to clarify decibel limits outlined by city ordinance, as well as any city zoning approval process followed for the current facility and recently confirmed expansion. We will share any response, once it is received, within this same article. Several residents described being approached, followed or told to leave by site security while on public roads near the facility. One resident said a neighbor who slowed down to look at the site from the road was followed back out to the main road by a security vehicle. "We know for sure that they knew we were coming,” Liddle said. The attorney also relayed claims made by residents that the company has begun reaching out to some nearby homeowners with buyout offers since the lawsuit was filed, something he said is common once litigation draws a company’s attention. Attorneys also explained the scope of the case, which they said specifically targets noise as a property-rights issue, rather than other issues like water use, despite many residents raising concerns about the facility’s water consumption and cooling systems. Under Michigan law, homeowners generally don’t hold personal rights to groundwater the way they do to “noise-free enjoyment of their property,” the attorneys said, though they left open the possibility of expanding the case later depending on what’s uncovered during discovery. https://wwmt.com/news/local/dowagiac-data-center-noise-lawsuit-hyperscale-lawyers-meeting-forum-facility-expansion-cass-county-alliance-cloud-services-ai-wwmt-michigan _______________ Stay up to date with our social media: WWMT on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wwmtnews WWMT on Twitter: https://twitter.com/wwmtnews Subscribe to WWMT on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAYwomlsmN0DsPeeumEKFXg/?sub_confirmation=1 WWMT Daily News Digest: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-oNVYSgKM8IBYJOY5M-p37vKcILekLNz For more information, visit https://www.wwmt.com/ Have a news tip? Send it directly to us: Email us: desk@wwmt.com Call the Newsroom: 800.875.3333 WWMT is a MI based station and a CBS Television affiliate owned and operated by Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. is one of the largest and most diversified television broadcasting companies in the country today. #WWMT #NEWSCHANNEL3 #Kalamazoo #Michigan