Construction on Meta’s largest data center brings 600% crash spike, chaos to rural Louisiana • Louisiana Illuminator

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Construction on Meta’s largest data center brings 600% crash spike, chaos to rural Louisiana

By:<br>Drew Hawkins, WWNO-FM<br>November 22, 2025<br>5:00 am

A dump truck drives past Holly Ridge Elementary School in Holly Ridge, Louisiana, on Friday, October 17, 2025. The school is less than a mile away from the construction site of Meta’s new data center, Hyperion. Officials shut down the playground in front of the school because of safety concerns related to the truck traffic. (Dylan Hawkins/Gulf States Newsroom)

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.”

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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.

Hull said she’s heard about trucks colliding and killing a driver, and described a near-miss when she and her grandmother “almost got killed” by an 18-wheeler.

“On the school bus, the trucks make you feel anxious that they’re gonna wreck,” the nine-year-old said. “It’s really bad. I don’t like it.”

Penelope Hull, her grandfather Randy Ogles, and brother Lucien Hull sit at a picnic bench outside Holly Ridge Elementary School in Holly Ridge, Louisiana, on Friday, October 17, 2025. Hull said the noise from the truck traffic outside of the school disrupts her classrooms and makes it hard to hear her teachers. (Photo by Dylan Hawkins/Gulf States Newsroom)<br>He ‘never had a license’

The Hyperion project came together over the course of 2024 through a whirlwind of negotiations and non-disclosure agreements between Meta, Entergy, and state officials who rewrote laws and created new tax exemptions to win the deal. While Meta estimates employing about 5,000 construction workers at the peak of the project, the 4-million-square-foot data center is expected to employ about 500 permanent workers once completed in 2030.

Crashes in Holly Ridge are surging in conjunction with the explosion in traffic around the Hyperion site. Traffic data from Louisiana’s Department of Transportation and Development (LaDOTD) gives a clear picture of how much it’s increased since Meta started construction.

LaDOTD installs temporary traffic count devices on state highways that record the total traffic volume over a 24-hour period. One of those locations is right in front of Holly Ridge Elementary School on Highway 183, which only has three recorded counts in the last 10 years.

A count taken on a school day in February 2022 recorded 1,817 vehicles in one day. The next available count from the same spot was taken in July 2025, showing a jump to 5,224 vehicles — nearly triple the previous count, despite being in the summertime with no school traffic.

A pair of dump trucks at a gas pump in Delhi, Louisiana, on Thursday, October 16, 2025. Since Meta...