Construction on Meta’s large data center brings car crash spike, chaos to rural Louisiana

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Penelope Hull doesn’t care that the road in front of her elementary school leads to what will be the largest data center in the world. She just misses the playground in front of Holly Ridge Elementary School.

It’s shut down this year because it faces the roads where, every day, thousands of dump trucks and 18-wheelers thunder toward “Hyperion,” Meta’s $27 billion data center being built less than a mile away.

Holly Ridge is a town of fewer than 2,000 in Richland Parish, in the northeast corner of the state, where nearly a quarter of residents live below the poverty line. Before Meta broke ground last December, the town’s two-lane roads were quiet, scenic routes mostly used by locals.

Now, the noise from the trucks lined up outside the elementary school shakes the classrooms.

“You can’t pay attention,” Hull, a fourth grader, said. “And then you get off track and you lose what the teacher was telling you to do.”
The school sits tucked in the corner where Highways 80 and 183 meet. At that intersection alone, there have been at least three big truck crashes this year.

“They wrecked into the gate, and then they had to build a whole new gate,” Hull said. “And that’s why they’re saying we shouldn’t go out there… because there’s too many wrecks and Meta trucks. And they could crash.”

On the roads surrounding Meta’s construction site, vehicle crashes have gone up by more than 600%. There have been 64 crashes between January and mid-September this year, compared to just nine for all of 2024, according to police records obtained by the Gulf States Newsroom.

In one crash, two dump trucks collided head-on. The driver who caused it had an expired Mexican driver’s license, and his injuries were so severe, he had to be airlifted to a hospital — with the helicopter landing in a field
behind the school.

In a statement to the Gulf States Newsroom, Meta said it sets strict guidelines about speed and safety, but did not respond to questions about specific crashes.

Interviews with residents and crash reports tell a different story: careless, reckless and sometimes unlicensed drivers rumbling through the rural town, endangering everyone.

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