The site in context

How far is the park from the nearest homes?

Distance is the single most reliable protection against data center noise — so here's the actual geography. The rings show how far sound carries over flat ground; the blue markers are the nearest residential areas, identified from state site listings and map data.

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What the map shows

  • The Kentucky Enterprise Industrial Park sits on a reclaimed surface-mine plateau south of Pikeville, between the US 23 corridor and the Island Creek valley. The park was built on former mine land starting with a $5 million Abandoned Mine Lands grant in 2016.136134
  • The likely building site is the state-certified Build-Ready pad (Lot A-3): a 100,000 sq ft graded pad on 9.32 buildable acres, completed with $4 million in city and state funding.135 The MOU identifies tracts A-3, A-4, A-5, A-6, and C-1 — all on the same bench.3
  • The nearest homes are not on the plateau. The closest residential area — the Island Creek valley subdivision northwest of the park — sits in the valley roughly 1,000–2,500 feet from the park boundary, and about a mile from the pad area. The hamlets of Pigeon, Yorktown, and Fords Branch lie roughly 1 to 1.6 miles away. Downtown Pikeville is about 3.9 miles.133
  • No schools or hospitals are within a mile of the park; Pikeville Medical Center and the city schools are 3+ miles away.133

What the terrain means for noise — honestly, both ways

The park’s elevation is its most unusual feature: the bench sits at roughly 1,250–1,325 feet, while the surrounding valley floors — where the homes are — sit 450–620 feet below it.133 That cuts both ways:

  • In the site’s favor: homes are below the plateau rim rather than line-of-sight with equipment, and the rim itself can act as a sound barrier — the geometry that setback-and-barrier mitigation tries to create artificially.27 Compare that with the worst documented cases, where equipment sat at the same grade as homes 100 yards away.35
  • Worth watching: nighttime temperature inversions — common in mountain valleys — can carry low-frequency sound farther than flat-ground math predicts, and sound that clears a rim can travel down a hollow.27 The rings on this map assume flat, open ground; real propagation here will differ in both directions.

The question this map can't answer

Where exactly within the 190 acres the cooling equipment and generators would sit, what design they use, and what numeric noise limit applies — those determine what anyone actually hears, and they belong in a pre-approval sound study and the Development Agreement. Virginia’s state auditors recommend exactly that: require sound modeling before approval, not complaints after.14

About the map's accuracy

The ring center is triangulated from three official listings of the park (the state datasheet pin printed on the MOU’s Exhibit A map, the Kentucky CED property listing, and the One East Kentucky marketing packet), which agree within a few hundred feet.3134133No surveyed coordinate for the building pad itself has been published, so treat all distances as approximate (±500 ft). Residential locations come from OpenStreetMap place data and the aerial imagery in the park’s marketing packet.133

Next: The full noise page — decibels, cases, standards