corporations are people until crimes
No, people who aren’t conscious also cannot be legally guilty. Its why fascists don’t get prosecuted.
They did get billed ~$150k and paid for the water. Questions have not been answered about how the two connections were made without the water authority’s knowledge. Seems difficult for a water main to just spontaneously form but maybe, I am not a pipe expert
My father worked for the city’s utilities and he said they could see when an ad break was during a big TV event because everyone was going to the toilet at the same time. They usually knew when someone had a broken pipe in their cellar before the owner did because of the change in pressure at that location.
No way did the city not know where the water was going.
I hadn’t thought of this, but it’s definitely a thing. They’ve been searching for missing pipes here since we got a data center our landlord emails about looking for leaks that don’t exist
This is one of those civilization ending things. Use of food and water in Palestine has been pretty awful.
Public utilities is woke socialism.
Certainly they knew, but did the same people who saw that knew it wasn’t supposed to be going there? Like you see millions going to a datacenter, but maybe you just assume that’s normal and have no idea that they aren’t being billed for it?
they knew, they just dont want to openly admit it, and just use ignorance.
We need to stop being cowards, and actively go after these people. Sue for every little thing, blacklist them, get them fired.
Water uhhhhh finds a way
Indeed this is a excellent comment on multiple levels.
The issue here would only be that it never naturally goes where you want it to 😉.
It flows down a pipe from Canada
🤓
~$150k and paid for the water
Can someone put that into perspective for me? I also have a hard time figuring how much 30 mil gallons actually is, like how many households for how long etc.
In any case, honest mistake sounds like a blatant lie, but hey, if POTUS does it why shouldn’t they?
People should provide article links.
According to the EPA, the average American family of four uses about 400 gallons of water per day, or 12,000 gallons per month. This feels high to me, but we’ll use that.
So, 30 million gallons is roughly the monthly usage of 2,500 four-person households, or the daily usage of 75,000 homes.
How does the average American Family manage that consumption?
German family of Four here: We use around 200liter a day. That’s roughly 50gallons. And we do wash ourselves and our clothes.
It’s for sure a lot. Maybe the Epa is counting the water that so many Americans spend watering our trademark huge monoculture lawns so they can stay green regardless of drought/heat wave conditions. Some homes have almost industrial scale sprinkler systems just to accomplish this, although I’m not confident even that would get you up to 400 gallons
That definitely feels high, mine is a household of two but I know exactly how much water I use because I’m off grid and I have to go haul it myself from the city my tank on my trailer holds 275 gallons and that’s generally enough to last me anywhere between a week to two weeks depending on how much laundry I need to do.
I shower daily, do dishes all the usual stuff so what the fuck is the average family doing with all that water that they are using more in a day than I do in a week
Not living off grid…?
I feel like you missed the part where I said that I’m showering daily, I have a dishwasher, do laundry with a standard front load washing machine i may not be connected to a city water but I have everything plumbed in i have all the usual stuff in a household. The only thing that was relevant about being off grid is that I have an exact understanding of how much water I go through at any given moment
No no I understand, I wasn’t meaning to be rude but just by virtue of the fact you are aware of every bit of water you’re using and need to plan ahead means you’re likely a lot more conservative with your usage, even if you’re going buck wild
There is no simple answer to how much that amount of water actually is since different uses have different impacts. E.g. irrigation is fundamentally different from evaporative cooling. And the amount of water consumed by a household directly is miniscule compared to the goods and services that take water to provide.
If you do napkin math you will be outraged.
E.g. lawn irrigation can take up enormous amounts of water, too, with much lower benefit. Asking people to conserve water that way is probably better than shutting down data centers which do in fact render a useful service.
If you do napkin math you will be outraged.
Somebody else provided that napkin math and it had the opposite effect. Now I’m outraged how much water the average US household uses.
The useful service of taking people’s clothes off online.
Honestly, if I thought that it would help our leaders to shift focus away from the underaged human beings, I’d be more supportive.
I worry that this will work more as an enticement, especially with their love of gambling.
You can do legitimately useful things with computers and ai, even.
You being nasty is your own problem.
You are absolutely correct! I evaporated 30 million gallons of water that I was not legally allowed to use. Would you like me to come up with a plan to reduce water usage?
I see what you did there; you won’t get away with it ChatGPT.
If corporations are people, I want to see Texas execute one!
I don’t understand how data centers work. Like are they hiring people to stand there with a hose spraying racks or something? Why the fuck isn’t this water being cycled?
The AC systems use adiabatic gas coolers to minimize their footprint and electricity use. An adiabatic gas cooler works very similarly to a standard AC condenser except that there is an aditional piece of media on the air inlet side of the condenser coil which is kept perpetually wet. Basically as air is pulled through that media it evaporates water and cools that air basically down to the local dew point. This means colder air cooling the refrigerant condenser and thus a smaller more electricity efficient condenser.
Adiabatic coolers are especially popular on CO2 based refrigeration systems because of the low critical temp of CO2. Basically once the ambient temp gets above 75-80F a standard gas cooler can no longer liquify CO2 because it just goes supercritical instead which results in a more inefficient refrigeration process. Adiabatic coolers can largely mitigate that issue.
Of course this whole process could be done without using water but it would require more electricity. Basically someone did the math and found out that using water was cheaper than using more electricity so that’s what they did. If we want data centers to stop using up all our water then the easiest fix is to just start charging them more for water.
most are closed loops, but some are not, i.e. cold water enters the datacenter, cools it, and then warm water leaves as waste water.
Can’t they use that steam to spin a turbine or something?
The heat you have available in a data center is pretty low-quality (cold) heat. If you’re not familiar with the field, a (very) basic introduction is looking at the Carnot efficiency: In principle, you could increase the pressure in the water with a pump, then let it evaporate, before extracting work in a turbine. Then, you condense the steam (by heat-exchanging with the ambient) before sending it back into the pump.
Now, if this process is ideal (frictionless pumps and turbines, perfect heat exchangers, etc.) we can figure out how much of the heat energy that can be converted to useful work (
turbine output-pump input). Assuming the ambient (our cold side) is about 25 C, and the racks we’re cooling (our hot side) operate at around 100 C, we get a Carnot efficiency of about 0.2. That means only 20 % of the heat can actually be converted work. Again, this is the ideal case. It is not thermodynamically possible to get better than this. Realistically, you could maybe get 10 % or something.So, bottom line: The racks aren’t really hot enough to extract meaningful work. A better proposal would probably be to build things like this in places that are cold and require heating, so that you could use the waste heat as a district heating source. In that case, you could more or less completely eliminate the need for other heating sources in homes (which are far too often electrical). Then, we would be using the electrical power (which is high-quality) for something “useful” (disregarding whether or not a data center is useful in the first place), and use the low-quality heat for what it does best (heating things to moderate temperatures).
There’s an Apple data center near me. They feed the hot water into the district heating system and use wind for electricity.
Even if it’s environmentally neutral, it’s still a ressource hog. Other businesses who want to switch to electricity are currently put on hold, because the data centers are maxing out the grid capacity. I guess it’s a luxury problem, but they’re causing delays for other businesses in going green, and all only for the purpose of storing iPhone messages and family pictures.
They have about a dozen employees. I think it’s mainly security. This has received some criticism because they originally pitched the idea with thousands of new jobs.
So overall, even in a best case scenario it’s waste of renewable energy and area which doesn’t create any income.
I can’t believe it: a ragebait screenshot with a mix of accurate and inaccurate details that make a bad situation look even worse. You all have frontal lobes, fellow apes. Use them to think critically, because there’s a REASON memes like this want you to react emotionally and it’s not in your best interests at all.
Tl;dr: the data center’s usage is an issue, the local governments that facilitate and even encourage this behaviour are arguably even worse.
Truth: this shit hole data center used 30M gallons of water over the course of several months without being billed for it.
Rage Bait: they did it “illegally.”
Truth: the data center fully intended and was allowed by local government to use that water in the course of its construction, but weren’t billed because they didn’t inform the local utility of one water hookup, and the utility cocked up by ignoring the usage for that hookup and failed to bill the center for the usage on its second hookup. The data center did exceed their usage limits, but that’s not illegal: they simply pay penalties for the overage. The local utility waived these penalties because they’re spineless.
Rage Bait: the exceedance caused a drop in water pressure.
Truth: the locals experiencing water pressure drops receive their water from groundwater while the data center uses surface water. Given groundwater recharge rates are painfully slow, the data center’s usage did not cause the issue, though the pressure complaints led to the investigation that found the billing issues.
Rage Bait: they did it “illegally.”
but weren’t billed because they didn’t inform the local utility of one water hookup,
^^ That’s the illegal part.
When a consumer hooks up a utility without informing the utility, that is “theft of services” and they are arrested.
https://www.4029tv.com/article/fort-smith-stealing-electricity/71286214
Except contextually that makes no sense. The utility was already aware the data center would be using the water, they simply cocked up the process. Theft of service is utilizing a service with no intent to ever pay. It’s clear that wasn’t the case here.
Understand, I’m not defending the data center. I hope the damned thing burns to the ground. I just have this quirk where I care about the truth of situations, not exaggerating every possible angle so we can pretend it’s worse than it truly is. That’s the kind of hysterics the US and many other legal systems engage in, exaggerating charges to maximize penalties against their citizens, instead of seeking the truth of the matter. It’s wrong when they do it, and it’s just as wrong when we do it.
The utility was already aware the data center would be using the water
So that means I can ask for an electric hookup, and then tap a second hookup without telling the electric company and it’s not illegal. If I get caught, no arrest, no fine, just pay back what I used before getting caught.
What makes it particularly suspicious is that they used more water than they agreed to. So we have a situation where they didn’t tell the water utility about one hookup AND used more than they agreed to. I wonder why they didn’t mention the extra hookup?
It has been clarified that the hookup wasn’t without the knowledge of the utility, it was a failure of a new transmitter/verifying they were getting readings.
I work in this realm and as soon as I read the quotes from the utility in the first batch of articles it was immediately clear that people who didn’t have all the information were responding to inquiries. Your average utility employee, even in admin functions have zero media training. If I had a penny for every time I had to deal with the fallout of some ambitious comment that was taken out of context by the media or public, I’d have several pennies.
“One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account and therefore wasn’t being billed,” Politico reported. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/data-center-used-30-million-gallons-of-water-without-initially-paying/
Your linked article references the account that was known but not billed. Ars Technica references both that account and a second account that wasn’t known and wasn’t billed.
Even the first account was illegal in that water usage exceeded the original water limits agreement.
I can see how you could read it like that but it has been further clarified:
Rapson, Tigert’s boss and the county’s top appointed official, has now told The Citizen on the record that the central claim in that letter is not accurate. County staff did inspect the meter at installation. Rapson’s exact words were, “It’s not like they put a meter in, threw a camel net over it, and we didn’t know they put the meter in.”
The same quote, without explicitly stating the meter was inspected, could be ambiguous. Further:
“Tigert herself has hedged her own letter publicly. She told E&E News, the Politico-owned outlet that broke the national story, “I may have hit ‘send’ too soon.” She acknowledged in the same piece that her staff may have known about the hookups, but that she had not been able to locate the inspection report.”
The letter was such a mess. You can’t use private fire fighting lines for non fire fighting purposes. It makes no sense the conversation would just be “oh we didn’t bill you”, not “you need to stop.”
The following section was incorrect, I was looking at the wrong line on the audit spreadsheet.
(Begin correction)
The board’s meeting minutes are similarly goofy.
The person who wrote this has no clue what they are talking about. The cost per unit water doubled because half the water production was unbilled. Their “leakage index” was 7.01 in 2024, up from 3.46 in 2023.
(End correction)
They haven’t met since March.
Tl;dr: the utility clarified there was no unauthorized connection, and wow they are absurdly understaffed I’m not surprised this is such a mess
From your own quote,
“that her staff may have known about the hookups, but that she had not been able to locate the inspection report.”
Again, there were 2 questionable hookups. Not one. Two. The first was known and not billed.
The second, by all current evidence, was not known about. “May have known.” “Can’t locate the inspection report.”
Third, they went over their agreed amount of water usage.
You keep discussing the first hookup, which wasn’t illegal and ignoring the second hookup which as of now, was illegal AND they illegally went over their water usage.
I don’t think we are going to see eye to eye on this. We are reading the quotes differently. I’ll try one more time.
All from this article: https://thecitizen.com/2026/05/14/the-qts-water-story-is-real-its-just-not-about-qts/
And referencing this letter: https://protectpwc.org/2026/05/05/13786/
There are actually three meters:
- 8" domestic, not given a meter number, on Tyrone road.
- 10" fireline (23006232), highway 54
- 10" fireline (23006231), Tyrone road
The letter says the 8" domestic was installed without inspection, and that the fireline on highway 54 was not hooked up to the account and the fire line on Tyrone road was using more water than allowed and therefore a higher rate will be charged. That’s 27.5 MG unbilled and 13.2 million at the ‘wrong’ rate.
Rapson, Tigert’s boss and the county’s top appointed official, has now told The Citizen on the record that the central claim in that letter is not accurate. County staff did inspect the meter at installation.
This accounts for the 'illegal hookup". The “central claim” is that there was a meter that was not inspected. This person has indicated that the meter was inspected.
Tigert herself has hedged her own letter publicly. She told E&E News, the Politico-owned outlet that broke the national story, “I may have hit ‘send’ too soon.” She acknowledged in the same piece that her staff may have known about the hookups, but that she had not been able to locate the inspection report.
She did not know about the hook up and inspection. She assumed there was no inspection because she could not locate the report.
I was wrong about the leak audits, I was looking at the wrong line of the reports. I will correct my comments.
