Amazon Data Center Slated for NC Town With Devastating Industrial History

Hamlet, North Carolina has been shaken by an industrial tragedy before. In 1991, a fire engulfed Imperial Foods Products’ chicken processing plant, stealing the lives of 25 workers who were locked inside the building. It represents the second deadliest industrial disaster in North Carolina’s history. Hamlet hasn’t let this memory fade: a memorial park occupies the former site, with 25 crepe myrtle trees planted to honor each victim. 

As Amazon breaks ground on a 650-acre, hyperscale data center on the outskirts of Hamlet, local residents fear another industrial tragedy looming on the horizon.

“Imperial Foods happened about 30 years ago. We lost a lot of family members in that fire,” said William Robert Ingram, the co-founder of the Richmond County Coalition for Justice and Black Empowerment, at a hearing last Thursday. “We will not forget them, and we can’t forget that. And so we won’t allow the Amazon data center to come here and be the next big thing to our community.”

Over 100 people filled the rows of the Old Richmond County Courthouse for the hearing hosted by North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, the state regulatory agency responsible for reviewing the permits for the Amazon data center. This hearing was focused on the remaining two air permits, which would authorize nearly 650 diesel generators to power Amazon’s data warehouses if granted regulatory approval. 

The 36 speakers, almost entirely residents from Hamlet or nearby towns in Richmond County, spoke unanimously in opposition to the new data center. The $10 billion project is the largest single capital investment in North Carolina’s history, but locals repeatedly expressed how the promise of jobs in their town simply wasn’t worth it. 

“There’s other choices,” continued Ingram. “We have other choices that we can make in our community to bring back jobs and to make sure we bring back something for our children’s future.”

This was the first time many in the town were able to provide feedback to state regulators on the project that was previously kept secret at Amazon’s request. 

After applying for an air permit in 2025, Amazon sent a letter to state regulators claiming that “the information at issue is subject to efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy,” urging regulators to not publicly share details of the project. Amazon argued that the “non-public details of Amazon’s data centers discussed in the Application are key to Amazon’s business model.” The letter was recently disclosed in files accompanying the state’s public notice about this hearing. 

Just recently, the Richmond Observer broke the news that 400 acres just north of Hamlet have been sold to a limited partnership company traced back to Digital Realty, a global data center company. Carl Coulthard, who lives across from the recently purchased lot, is bracing for a second data center.

“I live in my grandparents’ house that was built in 1956, and they bought the land from my neighbor who still lives there,” says Coulthard, in an interview that took place outside of the courthouse after the hearing. “I hoped my kids and grandkids would live there, but nobody wants to live across from a data center.” 

Data Centers Bring Risk of Another Deadly Fire

Across the country, firefighting crews and safety experts are scrambling to figure out how to prepare for a fire breaking out in these massive data warehouses, according to an article in the National Fire Protection Association journal. Amazon appears to have anticipated this fire risk by partnering with the town’s fire department to build a new substation directly on the data center’s campus, with staffing funded for two years.

Residents are also worried about the extraction of the community’s resources and emissions of pollutants into the small town of around 6,000 people, with nearly 40% who identify as Black, according to census data.

As Amazon expands its network of data centers, the environmental toll of these projects has come into sharper focus: the company’s data centers collectively withdrew 2.5 billion gallons of water in 2025, while releasing 80 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, more pollution than the entire country of New Zealand. 

Last week’s hearing especially focused on how Amazon’s data centers could impact local air quality in Hamlet. Until the data center is hooked up to Duke Energy’s utility grid within a year, it will be temporarily powered by 57 diesel-fired generators, spewing nearly 5 tons of particulate matter, along with hazardous air pollutants, like benzene and sulfur dioxide. Duke Energy awaits an air permit for these generators. 

Amazon is also awaiting an air permit for a backup plan. If this power system fails, Amazon has requested for another 588 diesel-fired engines to be on standby, ready to kick in and release up to 250 tons of nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds per year. 

Many at the hearing questioned why the generators were divided into two separate permits filed by different companies and whether this would enable the project to evade more stringent emissions thresholds. The Southern Environmental Law Center filed a comment calling for the generators to be “permitted as a single, major stationary source.”

Local residents urged authorities to deny these remaining permits, citing that the construction of the data center has already disturbed their lives and health. 

“For 24 hours a day, for some three months, they burned the woods that were there,” said Lee Quick, who lives across the data center, in his testimony. “It got to the point that I could not sit on my patio where I enjoyed my morning coffee. I had to purchase two car covers to keep ashes from falling on my car. So I think that’s an indication of what burning diesel fuel is going to do.”

Another nearby resident Nellie Dumas, age 78, described how the facility’s construction has led to damaged power lines and deteriorating water quality. Her house is about a mile from the new data center, while her younger sister, age 76, lives even closer. 

“As of this morning, I received a call from my sister informing me that she had lost her landline power to her phone service and technical cable service due to lines that have been damaged by ongoing work on the Amazon Tech Campus site,” Dumas said in her testimony. 

She also testified to problems with low water pressure and muddy, cold water since Amazon began tearing up the ground around her. 

Compounding Risks From Extractive Industries

The data center will add to the many industrial sources of pollution in Richmond County, a major hub of both manufacturing and chicken production, raising around 45 million broilers per year. Over several decades, Dumas has observed that the land abutting Airport Road in Hamlet has been a repeated target for pollutive industries. 

“That particular area seems like a target,” she says, in an interview after the hearing. Before the data center, she claims that a nearby chicken farm had tainted the drinking water supply. “I didn’t even want to take a shower, let alone drink the water,” says Dumas. “When we turned the water on, it smelled horrible. I don’t know if you’ve ever passed a sulfur factory — that’s what it smelled like. It was really, really bad.”

In May of 2025, the Richmond County Board of Commissioners authorized the sale of the 50-acre chicken farm, along with other parcels of land, to Project Blue Marvin, the internal name for the Amazon data center in Hamlet, according to the county records. 

After the chicken farm closed, Dumas experienced a brief period of relief. “The smell has started to dissipate. But the damage to the soil will be years and years, as you know, if it ever goes away.” The construction of the data center has eclipsed her hope of these environmental problems being resolved. She doesn’t soften the reality her town faces: “A lot of people will suffer from different diseases. There’s no way around it. We are right there.”

As Amazon turns the land around her house into a dusty crater, cleared to make way for the data center, she is reminded of the town’s more distant past. Vividly recalling the day of the 1991 fire, she describes how “sons came running in the house, saying that there was a disaster in Hamlet.” She then turned on the news. She was living in Maryland at the time, but the image of the “people were found stacked on each other, where they all piled up at the door trying to get out” has never left her. 

The fire was a preventable tragedy, the result of industry neglect. The doors were locked shut with chains, and the processing plant had not received a single inspection. Dumas is worried that the town may fall victim to industrial neglect once again. 

“This is how people come on and take advantage of places like Hamlet,” she says. “And my fear is that as surely — as all of that [data center construction] happens on Airport Road — eventually there’s going to be another disaster.”