[Editorial] The Town Without Wi-Fi

[lioneatszebra]

The Town Without Wi-Fi
The residents of Green Bank, West Virginia, can't use cell phones, wi-fi, or other kinds of modern technology due to a high-tech government telescope. Recently, this ban has made the town a magnet for technophobes, and the locals aren't thrilled to have them.

Monique Grimes had just moved to Florida for a new job when the syndrome started.

On the third morning in her St. Petersburg apartment, she woke with a harsh thumping in her chest: heart palpitations.

Within hours, it felt as if someone had tied a thick rubber band around her head. Then came nausea, fatigue, ringing in her left ear—an onslaught of maladies, all at once, and she had no idea why. "I was trying to come up with every excuse in the world for what was happening to me," she says. "Moving is stressful, but the symptoms just kept piling on."

In 2012, after a decade as the owner of a Connecticut catering company and an office worker in finance and construction, Grimes had gone to Florida to be a speaker for a public-policy group. A week or two into the job, whatever was afflicting her still wasn't abating, and before long her speech became so jumbled that she couldn't form a complete sentence in front of an audience.

She saw an internist, a neurologist, then a psychiatrist, and still had no explanation. "If we can't test it," one said, "it doesn't exist." Grimes started poking around online and soon remembered reading an article about the potentially deleterious health effects of the new "smart" electricity meters that were rolling out across the country. The devices send customers' usage data back to the utility over wireless signals. Did her building have them?

She went outside to inspect the place and found no fewer than 17 of the meters strapped to the side of the building.

Grimes's sleuthing didn't end there. She went back online and found herself scrolling through tale after tale of people all over the world getting sick from the devices. And it wasn't just smart meters. It turned out there was a whole community of people out there who called themselves "electrosensitives" and said they were suffering due to the electromagnetic frequencies that radiate wirelessly from cell phones, wi-fi networks, radio waves, and virtually every other modern technology that the rest of society now thinks of as indispensable.

The affliction has been dubbed "electromagnetic hypersensitivity," or EHS, and it involves a textbook's worth of ailments: headaches, nausea, insomnia, chest pains, disorientation, digestive difficulties, and so on. Mainstream medicine doesn't recognize the syndrome, but the symptoms described everything Grimes was experiencing.

She went back to her doctors with her newfound evidence of EHS, relieved to have sorted out the mystery. But she got no sympathy. As she puts it, "They look at you like you have three heads."

Grimes moved to a new building, then another, and six more times, but at each turn a smart-meter rollout wasn't far behind. "I sat down there in Florida," she says, "and just prayed to God: 'Where is my way out?' "

That's when she heard about a little town called Green Bank, West Virginia.

In Green Bank, you can't make a call on your cell phone, and you can't text on it, either. Wireless internet is outlawed, as is Bluetooth. It's a premodern place by design, devoid of the gadgets and technologies that define life today. And thanks to Uncle Sam, it will stay that way: The town is part of a federally mandated zone where a government high-tech facility's needs come first. Wireless signals are verboten.

In electromagnetic terms, it's the quietest place on Earth—blanketed by the kind of silence that's golden to electrosensitives like Monique Grimes.

And as she discovered, it's become a refuge for them.

Over the last few years, electrosensitives have flocked to the tech-free idyll in West Virginia, taking shelter beside cows and farms and fellow sufferers. Up here, no one would look at them as if they had three heads. Well, except for the locals, that is.

The reason for all the peace and quiet in town is visible the moment you arrive.

It's the Robert C. Byrd telescope, a gleaming white, 485-foot-tall behemoth of a dish that looms over tiny Green Bank, population 143.

There's only one road into town, about four hours from DC. The way there snakes through the Allegheny Mountains, each town you pass through smaller than the last as the bars on your cell phone fall like dominoes and the scan function on the radio ceases to work, the dial rotating endlessly in search of signals.

Where the forest ends, the town begins. The valley opens to cattle farms and old wooden barns, a post office and a library, a bank and Henry's Quick Stop, a combination gas station/convenience store/rustic interior-decor shop that houses Green Bank's nearest approximation to a sit-down restaurant. Across the street, the Dollar General was a lifesaver when it opened five years ago—before that, the closest grocery store was in Marlinton, 26 miles down the road.

At the northern end of town is the other visible curiosity in Green Bank besides the telescope: a rusted pay phone. If you're not from there, it's ostensibly the only way to reach the rest of the world. "Sometimes you get people passing through who get aggravated they can't get a signal," says Bob Earvine, owner of Trents General Store. "But just about anybody will let you use their phone."

Rising above it all is the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, a.k.a. the GBT. It's the largest of its kind in the world and one of nine in Green Bank, all of them government-owned and operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

The telescopes aren't "ocular" ones, the kind you're probably thinking of. They're radio telescopes. So instead of putting your eye to the apparatus and looking for distant stars, you listen for them. The patterns of electromagnetic radiation coming off a planet or other celestial bodies apparently reveal entirely different things than what's visible to the eye, and even allow scientists to study regions of space where light can't reach. In recent years, the telescopes have been used to track NASA's Cassini probe to Saturn's moon and to examine Mercury's molten core.

Obscure as the work may sound, there's a long line of astronomers all over the world who want to use the GBT, a telescope known to be so sensitive that it can pick up the energy equivalent of a single snowflake hitting the ground. These scientists swamp the NRAO with their research proposals—the observatory is four times oversubscribed.

So why does such a sensitive listening tool need total technological silence to operate? A little history—starting with telephones, in fact—helps explain.

In 1932, when Bell Labs was installing phone systems across the US, its technicians kept hearing static over the transmissions. The company hired an electrical engineer to find the source, and he discovered that all the noise was "the Milky Way galaxy itself," says Mike Holstine, the telescope's business manager, with a hint of awe in his voice.

Two decades later, the federal government decided the country should invest in listening to the far reaches of the galaxy and needed its own radio telescope to do so. The question was where to put it. Because even a basic AM radio transmission is enough to overpower faint readings from outer space, the only place for such a listening post was the hinterlands.

Enter Green Bank. Surrounded by the Alleghenies, and thus buffered from outside frequencies, the rural town had little established industry—or potential for one. That meant the telescope wouldn't have to deal with a population influx later. Plus, Green Bank sat on the 38th Parallel, with an ideal view of the Milky Way.

In 1958, the Federal Communications Commission established the 13,000-square-mile National Radio Quiet Zone, a one-of-a-kind area encompassing Green Bank where, to this day, electromagnetic silence is enforced every hour of every day. The strictest rules are found within the ten square miles immediately surrounding Green Bank, where most forms of modern communication—i.e., cell phones and wi-fi—are banned under state law. Residents are allowed to use land-line phones and wired internet, "but it is sloooow," in the words of one Green Banker.

The Quiet Zone is a vast place, much of it made up of national parks and empty space, the whole thing roughly the size of Maryland. But lately, because of how much its way of life has diverged from the rest of America's and whom that's attracted to the place, the little town of Green Bank has come to feel smaller than ever.

Read more at http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/the-town-without-wi-fi/?src=longreads&mc_cid=211af0517e&mc_eid=290a0d1dfd and be sure to check out the photos that accompany the story!