Behind a wire fence lies a vast gaping wound of earth. Before Google’s arrival a few months ago, an estimated quarter of a million trees occupied the 330 hectares (815 acres) of forest near the town of Muhos in rural northern Finland. Now they are all gone.
After the tech company illegally stripped the entire area to build a datacentre – taking even the top soil with it – all that remains is a vast expanse of mud indented with the trail marks of machinery, puddles and mounds of earth, roots and branches. Residents say that brown water flowing off the site is going into a stream that feeds the Oulujoki River.
No it did not “kind of happen overnight”.
What’s your source?
Any finnish article that talks about the timeline.
Afaik they asked for permissions in March, the permission was pending and they already were felling trees.
Few months later they are like “oh there is this building law that can give us permissions”
They also file that and get permission for “preliminary construction proceedings” or something like that, while the permission from the first place that is trying to calculate the environmental impact is still pending, they halt the site in october.
So about 6 months it was going and someone should have stopped it if permissions were not cleared.
https://yle.fi/a/74-20251890