About this project

Why this exists

Loudoun County has the largest concentration of data centers in the world. The county publishes exactly where they are, how big they are and what is coming next — that data is genuinely good and genuinely open.

What nobody publishes is the other half. Residents describing generator noise, diesel smells, well pressure, night lighting and stalled house sales are doing it three minutes at a time at Board meetings, in neighbourhood Facebook groups, and to local reporters. Each account is easy to wave away on its own. Together they are a pattern, and there was nowhere that pattern could be seen.

This site puts the county's facility data and residents' accounts on the same map, and turns the accounts into numbers on the statistics page that a supervisor, a journalist or a neighbour can point at.

What this is not

It is worth being blunt about the limits, because a project like this is only useful if people trust it.

• Not affiliated with Loudoun County. The county publishes the facility data used here, but does not operate, review or monitor this site. Filing a report here files nothing with the county — do that separately.
• Not affiliated with Erin Brockovich. This project is modelled on the approach taken by brockovichdatacenter.com, which collects data center reports across the United States. It is not run by, endorsed by or connected to that project. This one is Loudoun County only.
• Not a survey. People who are unaffected rarely file a report. The data here is self-selected and should never be described as representative of the county.
• Not an investigation. Reports are unverified first-hand accounts. They are not corroborated, not measured, and not findings of fact. They do not establish that any company caused any condition described.
• Not legal advice, and not a channel for emergencies.

Where the data comes from

Every data center on the map comes from Loudoun County GIS, pulled directly from the county's public ArcGIS services. Nothing is hand-entered or scraped from commercial directories.

The county refreshes the parcel layers roughly every six months. Exactly what was fetched, when, and every transformation applied to it is recorded in data/PROVENANCE.md in the repository — including the fact that one county record contains a typo in its status field, which is why status matching is substring-based rather than exact.

A note on facility ownership

Owner names on facility pins are the property owner recorded in Loudoun County land records. That is very often a holding company rather than the brand operating the building, it can be out of date, and it says nothing about who is responsible for any condition a resident reports. Treat it as a starting point for research, not as an accusation.

How reports are handled

Every submission goes into a moderation queue and is read by a person before it appears anywhere public. Contact details are never published. Map pins are offset 100–200 m from the reported location, and photos have their metadata — including the GPS tags phones write — stripped in your browser before they are ever uploaded.

The privacy policy covers this in full, and the FAQ explains what does and doesn't get published.

Demo mode

If the yellow banner is showing, this copy of the site has no database connected. In that state the reports you see are illustrative samples rather than real submissions, and anything you submit is saved only in your own browser. It exists so the project can be cloned and explored without any setup.

To connect a real database, create a free Supabase project, run the four SQL files in sql/, and paste the project URL and anon key into js/config.js. The README.md walks through it. Nothing else in the site needs to change — every page talks to a single storage adapter.

Built with

Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with no build step and no framework, so it stays cheap to host and easy for anyone to pick up and maintain. Leaflet draws the map, OpenStreetMap provides the tiles, and Supabase stores the reports. All three libraries are vendored into the repository, so the site keeps working if a CDN doesn't.

Contact

For corrections, takedown requests, data enquiries, or to help run this:

No contact address has been configured for this deployment yet. Set CONTACT_EMAIL in js/config.js.

Credits

• Facility and district data: Loudoun County GIS.
• Basemap: OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License.
• Concept: Brockovich Data Center Reporting, which showed that a self-reporting map is a workable way to gather this kind of account at scale.
• Most of all: the residents who take the time to write down what is happening where they live.