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ADAMSTOWN, Md. — Alleged environmental abuses continue to plague a controversial mega data center project in the southern part of Frederick County.
State inspectors returned on April 25 to the sites where life-choking drilling mud has been fouling streams. They reported new violations, and found some of the old ones still haven’t been fixed.
The violations are called frac-outs. They happen when drills being used to put in a 42-mile fiber optic tunnel under the Potomac and Monocacy rivers called the Q-LOOP blow out on the surface.
The frac-outs are spewing a drilling mud called bentonite into the environment. Bentonite is a clay that is sometimes used in fracking for gas and oil. It’s non-toxic, but it is so gooey it can coat the bottom of rocky streams and smother aquatic life.
“Many areas of sediment (bentonite) pollution were found in the Waters of the State,” said the latest reports from Maryland’s Department of Environment.
Steve Black of the Sugarloaf Alliance is a community watchdog keeping tabs on the project. He called bentonite releases “lsediment pollution on steroids.”
“This is an engineered product that’s specifically designed to coat surfaces,” Black said. “And if you coat aquatic plants and animals, insects, fish, they die. That this is a major problem.”
The latest report was a follow up to an April 4 inspection that found 19 violations.
RELATED: New concerns raised over Frederick data center plans after pollution violations uncovered
“They’ve had three more inspections by MDE and every one of those showed not just continuing violations from the previous inspection, but new violations with every inspection that MDE performs,” Black said.
In an exclusive interview on May 9, Rich Paul-Hus, the a co-founder of the company behind the Q-Loop drilling project, reacted to the earlier violations.
“My commitment to you and skeptics is we will improve,” Paul-Hus said. “We will get better and we will do better.”
RELATED: Exclusive: Massive scale of data center development plans in Frederick County addressed by company co-founder
Black responded Tuesday to that commitment.
“I take them at their word,” he said. “I’m sure they would like to do better, but it’s time to actually do better.”
RELATED: Opponents tap brakes on Maryland’s first ‘hyper-scaled’ data center development
Quantum Loophole aims to build a gigawatt scale, master planned data center office complex on 2,100 acres in Frederick County. The Q-Loop fiber optic tunnel cited in the latest environmental violations would link Quantum Loophole’s future Maryland campus to the data industry in Northern Virginia.
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