West Virginia Town of Green Bank Has Become a Refuge For Electrosensitive People

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Brandon Barrett arrived here two weeks ago, sick but hopeful, like dozens before him. Just a few years back, he could dead lift 660 pounds. After an injury while training to be a professional dirt-bike rider, he opened a motorcycle shop just north of Buffalo. When he wasn't working, he would cleanse his mind through rigorous meditation. In 2019, he began getting sick. And then sicker. Brain fog. Memory issues. Difficulty focusing. Depression. Anxiety. Fatigue. Brandon was pretty sure he knew why: the cell tower a quarter-mile behind his shop and all the electromagnetic radiation it produces, that cellphones produce, that WiFi routers produce, that Bluetooth produces, that the whole damn world produces. He thought about the invisible waves that zip through our airspace -- maybe they pollute our bodies, somehow? [...]

Then Brandon read about Green Bank, an unincorporated speck on the West Virginia map, hidden in the Allegheny Mountains, about a four-hour drive southwest of D.C. There are no cell towers there, by design. He read that other sick people had moved here and gotten better, that the area's electromagnetic quietude is protected by the federal government. Perhaps it could protect Brandon. It's quiet here so that scientists can listen to corners of the universe, billions of light-years away. In the 1950s, the federal government snatched up farmland to build the Green Bank Observatory. It's now home to the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Radio Telescope, the largest steerable telescope in the world at 7,600 metric tons and a height of 485 feet. Its 2.3-acre dish can study quasars and pulsars, map asteroids and planets, and search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.

The observatory's machines are so sensitive that terrestrial radio waves would interfere with their astronomical exploration, like a shout (a bunch of WiFi signals) drowning out a whisper (signals from the clouds of hydrogen hanging out between galaxies). So in 1958, the Federal Communications Commission created the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square-mile area encompassing wedges of both Virginia and West Virginia, where radio transmissions are restricted to varying degrees. At its center is a 10-mile zone around the observatory where WiFi, cellphones and cordless phones -- among many other types of wave-emitting equipment -- are outlawed. Wired internet is okay, as are televisions -- though you must have a cable or satellite provider. It's not a place out of 100 years ago. More like 30. If you want to make plans to meet someone, you make them in person. Some people move here to work at the observatory. Others come because they feel like they have to. These are the 'electrosensitives,' as they often refer to themselves. They are ill, and Green Bank is their Lourdes. The electrosensitives guess that they number at least 75 in Pocahontas County, which has a population of roughly 7,500. Literary Hub, the BBC, Slate, and the Washingtonian have non-paywalled articles about Green Bank and the "wi-fi refugees" that shelter there.

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