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Monday, January 05, 2015

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.

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.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wait. Nobody is allowed WIFI, but the power company is allowed to broadcast WIFI all over the town?

Anybody see anything wrong with this picture?

Anonymous said...

6:00, try reading the article first.