You know you’ve made it as a journalist when your mom sees you on the seven o’clock news.

Well, considering how packed the Richmond Hill City Center was on Monday night, she probably only really saw the sides of my ponytail, if that. Still, I’ll take it. Either way, she seemed very proud of me for covering something so important- sounding. Makes my college degree worth it, she said. Go Dawgs.

It feels like every editor and their mom living in Coastal Georgia now knows about Westwin Elements. For those of you living under a rock, or perhaps right next door to the old Caesarstone complex, Westwin Elements is this snazzy new start-up out of Oklahoma that wants to build a nickel refinery right in Richmond Hill.

And as you probably read from my intrepid new reporter Lucille Lannigan’s story this week, the Westwin folk really did want this to happen, at least before Tuesday’s emergency County Commission meeting blocked their advances by launching a investigation into possible contamination at the Caesarstone site under Georgia’s public nuisance laws.

But anyways, Westwin hosted this ‘City Hall’-type meeting at the Richmond Hill City Center Monday evening to help answer questions and to allay some fears from locals who are worried that all this talk of nickel makes no darn cents. (The pun there was so funny you probably forgot to laugh).

In all seriousness, the town hall was quite a spectacle, with a turnout bigger than my quinceñaera party. About 300 or so people were packed inside the City Center like sardines, with three different projector screens showing the official Westwin slideshow presentation given by KaLeigh Long, the founder and CEO of Westwin Elements.

To prepare for this meeting, I went to go buy provisions at Parker’s, and like any good editor, I bought Lucy a bag of Sour Patch Kids because she said those were her favorite candy. I’m more of a sweet tooth, so for that evening I bought myself some coffee cake and a Starbucks Frappucchino bottled drink. Apparently Westwin also thought ahead, because I saw that they ordered catering from Chick-fil-A for the angry town hall visitors. There, that’ll win people over.

Newspaper editors are supposed to be this infinite wealth of knowledge for the community, but unfortunately just like many ordinary residents in Richmond Hill I was completely blindsided when I started hearing reports of petitions in support of this refinery being shared by folks in Goodwill and Dollar Tree parking lots.

In my limited life experience, petitions on clipboards are usually shared by high school students wanting to bring back Otis Spunkmeyer cookies to their cafeteria’s menu. (Spoiler alert: it didn’t work).

This is a fast-developing story, and folks in the meantime are of course sharing their thoughts and opinions candidly on Facebook, the local watering hole for suburban America. If you couldn’t already tell, I have never been involved in a situation like this Westwin stuff before in my 24 and a half years of living, and I like to use humor as a coping mechanism for dealing with such uncertainty.

But as your editor, I’ll do my absolute best with me and my newsroom (read: me, Lucille, and the half-dead wasp stuck in our office’s bathroom vent) to cover the Westwin saga as best as we can so that our readers, many of whom live and work in Richmond Hill, can stay abreast of all the new developments.

Never fear: the Fourth Estate is on the case! (If I were Batman, my Batsignal would just be a chicken sandwich with a side of waffle fries and a Coke).

Andrea Gutierrez is the editor of the Bryan County News.