THIS WEST VIRGINIA TOWN HAS GONE RADIO SILENT
GREETINGS FROM THE QUIET ZONE
By Steve
Featherstone Posted March 16,
2015
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Illustration by Max Temescu
The town of Green Bank, West Virginia, sits at
the heart of the National Radio Quiet Zone, where cellphones, Wi-Fi routers,
and broadcast antennas are all but absent. For most, it is a throwback to a
different era. But for an increasing number of new residents, it is a rare
refuge from wireless technology. Welcome to the fringe of the electromagnetic
age.The town of Green Bank, West Virginia, sits at the heart of the National
Radio Quiet Zone, where cellphones, Wi-Fi routers, and broadcast antennas are
all but absent. For most, it is a throwback to a different era. But for an
increasing number of new residents, it is a rare refuge from wireless
technology. Welcome to the fringe of the electromagnetic age.
One day in 2003, Diane Schou’s hair started
falling out. She got rashes and lingering headaches. Her doctor didn’t know
what was causing her symptoms, but Diane began to have her suspicions. She’d
fallen ill around the same time a new cellphone tower went up near her Iowa
farm. When she drove by the tower, her headaches worsened. So she and her
husband, Bert, jumped in their Winnebago and fled. Diane didn’t know what she
was running from. All she knew was that she felt better the farther she got from
that cell tower, and civilization in general.
Months after leaving Iowa, while stopped at a
state park in North Carolina, a forest ranger told the Schous about a place
called Green Bank, West Virginia. It was in the middle of something called the
National Radio Quiet Zone. So the Schous went to Green Bank for a few days. It
was a nice place, but they quickly moved on, like gypsies of the
electromagnetic age, searching for somewhere insulated from the technology now
synonymous with modern society. Along the way, Diane learned that her
affliction had a name--electrohypersensitivity, or EHS--and that there were
other electrosensitives like her. She also learned that most doctors don’t
believe her condition exists, at least outside of her mind.
According to the World Health Organization
(WHO), EHS is not a medical diagnosis, but rather a vague set of symptoms with
no apparent physiological basis. Even so, the condition--whatever its
cause--appears to be widespread. Olle Johansson, an associate professor of neuroscience
at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, says the number of people who claim to
have EHS varies by country, from 8 percent of the population in Germany to 3.5
percent, or about 11 million people, in the U.S.
“There are few epidemic diseases this large,”
Johansson says. “Nowadays, wherever you live, whatever you do, you’re
whole-body exposed, 24/7.”
Photograph by Steve Featherstone
The Green Bank Telescope is so sensitive that
even a poorly insulated electric fence miles away can skew readings.
For Diane, the debate around EHS was academic.
Her suffering was real, and no matter how far she ran--to an island in
Nicaragua or a yurt in Lapland--she kept coming back to one place: Green Bank,
population 143. In 2007, after racking up 170,000 miles on their RV, Diane and
Bert sold off half their farmland in Iowa and used the money to buy a house in
Green Bank. Diane has lived there ever since.
Over the past several years, Diane’s symptoms
have faded. Her rashes disappeared. Her hair grew back. And while she says a
stranger’s cellphone will still send bolts of pain through her head, she’s
recovered to the point that she can use a computer again. But she can never
return to the farm in Iowa. Green Bank is her home now, and that’s given Diane
a certain sense of purpose. As a conductor on the electrosensitive underground
railroad, she has helped, by her estimate, dozens of technological refugees
find shelter there. More are arriving every year, and they’re finding that
getting out of the radiation is the easy part. Fitting into a small town is a
whole different story.
Green Bank is more a hamlet than an actual
town. There is a library, a post office, and a school, but mostly it consists
of farms and houses scattered throughout a pastoral valley in the Allegheny
Mountains, surrounded by steep, forested slopes. Three years ago, Melissa
Chalmers and a woman I’ll call Jane (at her request for privacy), met through
Diane on an EHS Internet forum. Both women are airline pilots, and they had
been looking for a retreat from the Wi-Fi and cellphones they so often contend
with while traveling. Diane encouraged them to come to Green Bank for a trial
visit.
On a cold November evening, I met Melissa and
Jane at the Green Bank Cabins, a row of three log cabins located next to the
Dollar General store. Billed as a rustic escape from “the fast pace of life,”
the one-room cabins were built in 1810 and have since been updated with
electricity and plumbing. I rented the cabin next to Melissa and Jane’s. We
planned to explore Green Bank together, so I could see how they responded.
Things were not going well. Even after switching off the cabin’s circuit
breakers and lighting candles, Jane said she felt itchy. Every 20 minutes, she
got up to check her soaring blood pressure with a portable monitor. Melissa was
uncomfortable too. She winced occasionally at the stray electromagnetic pulses
that she said needled her skin.
“It doesn’t just stop at your skin, like light
would,” she said. “It goes into your body. You start getting all fogged out.”
Melissa pulled a digital gauss meter from her
luggage. She began tracing the web of electrical wires stapled to their cabin’s
log walls, searching for errant sources of electromagmetic radiation (EMR).
Then she scanned the air using a radio frequency (RF) meter that looked like a
prop from the set of the old Lost in Space program. She found slightly higher
readings in that cabin than mine, so I obliged when they asked me to switch.
The next morning, I found Melissa holding her gauss meter beneath some power
lines running behind my cabin. “I think I found the source,” she grinned. “I
told you there was something.”
Photograph by Steve Featherstone
Diane Schou is a leader of Green Bank’s
electrosensitive community. At home, she can use a computer, but only
sparingly.
A little later, I grabbed breakfast at Henry’s
Quick Stop and drove two miles up the road to see the town’s most notable
landmark, the Green Bank Telescope (GBT), the largest steerable radio telescope
in the world. Up close, the GBT is a behemoth of white steel and aluminium
scaffolding taller than the Statue of Liberty. Its 100-meter dish is visible
from just about everywhere in the valley, and it’s perhaps the only thing in
town that’s more finely tuned to electromagnetic fields than electrosensitives
themselves.
The purpose of the GBT is to capture extremely
weak radio signals emanating from the farthest reaches of space. In 1958, the
federal government created the National Radio Quiet Zone to shield the GBT and
the nearby Sugar Grove listening post (now run by the National Security Agency)
from electromagnetic interference. As a result, cellphone, television, and
radio transmissions--all of which rely on electromagnetic waves--are heavily
restricted within its 13,000-square-mile area and banned in a 10-mile radius
around the GBT. Residents are not entirely cut off. They can access TV and Internet
with cable. But Green Bank is one of the few places in the world where
electrosensitives can be certain that no one is going to erect a cell tower in
their backyard or bolt a smart meter to their house.
Although it’s in the heart of the Quiet Zone,
Green Bank isn’t completely free of EMR. After all, sunlight is a form of EMR,
and electromagnetic fields ring the planet. The big difference between natural
sources and man-made ones is their intensity. “Compared to natural levels, the
exposure levels today are astronomical,” Johansson says. “I would even say
biblical--enormously high.” For example, he says, if you were to take a
cellphone and place it on the moon in standby mode, it would still be the most
powerful EMR source in the universe from the perspective of Earth.
"It doesn’t just
stop at your skin, like light would. It goes into your body. You start getting
all fogged out."
Electrosensitives say they feel electromagnetic
fields the same way the GBT detects radio signals from space--except it hurts.
“I feel like I’m being cooked to death every time I get in the plane,” Jane
says.
As palpable as Jane’s symptoms are to her--and
as certain as she is that they’re caused by EMR--scientific consensus
disagrees. Almost universally, scientists hold that most EMR has no adverse
health effects at the levels people typically encounter. And no study has ever
definitively linked EHS symptoms to RF radiation, a type of electromagnetic
radiation that originates from wireless devices, such as Wi-Fi routers,
cellphones, base stations, or Bluetooth antennas. “Health agencies have
repeatedly waded through the scientific literature,” says Kenneth Foster,
professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, “and they don’t
see any clear evidence that there’s a problem other than if you put a rat in a
microwave oven, it’s bad for the rat.”
The only recognized health risk from RF
radiation is the heating of tissue (as in the rat in the microwave). In 1996,
the Federal Communications Commission adopted a safety standard for RF-emitting
devices based on thermal heating. That’s why even though the standard is set
far below levels recognized to cause harm, wireless companies still recommend
not carrying your phone around in your pocket or sleeping with one too close to
your head.
Photograph by Steve Featherstone
The café at the Green Bank observatory is one
of the few lunch spots in town.
According to Joel Moskowitz, the director of
the Center for Family and Community Health at the University of California at
Berkeley, the test for the thermal standard is outdated if not irrelevant.
“It’s not at all reflective of what the average user looks like today and not
really of any user anywhere,” he says. “It’s not even the right measurement.”
Moskowitz believes that science hasn’t caught up with the rapid proliferation
of RF-emitting devices--from smartphones to smart meters--that have been
spilling radiation into our homes, schools, and workplaces over the past two
decades. Electrosensitives may be the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, he
says. He cites a growing body of research that suggests RF exposure has many
nonthermal biological effects, including damage to sperm cells and changes in
brain chemistry. “There are a lot of unanswered questions, obviously, but we
clearly have evidence for precautionary health warnings,” Moskowitz says.
Melissa and Jane certainly had no shortage of
questions by their second day in Green Bank. Jane’s blood pressure hadn’t gone
down, and Melissa still felt tingly sensations on her skin. Something was
triggering their symptoms, but Melissa’s equipment couldn’t identify what it
was. According to a survey of dozens of studies, the biggest challenge in
diagnosing EHS is that those suffering from it often exhibit what’s called the
“nocebo effect,” where even the expectation of exposure to EMR can cause
physiological symptoms. During dinner at the cabin, Melissa switched on her RF
meter and began walking around the room. The reading was 100 times lower than
what she’d recorded in the basement of her home in Canada before a cellphone
company put up towers nearby. Puzzled by this, Melissa and Jane tried to square
their symptoms with the extremely low measurement.
“Maybe I’m reading it wrong,” Melissa said,
pressing the meter’s buttons.
“They don’t call it the National Radio Quiet
Zone for nothing,” I said. “Maybe it really is that low,” Melissa shrugged.
“It’s just that I’ve never seen it that low.”
Like Diane Schou, Jennifer Woods’s journey as
an electrosensitive began with upheaval. In 1997, she quit her job as an
architect and left her family in Hawaii. She spent the next decade adrift,
mostly living out of her car as she drove across the country seeking a cure for
her chronic health problems. She tried conventional medicine and homeopathic
treatments, but nothing worked. Three years ago, she heard about Green Bank at
an alternative medicine conference; within 48 hours, she was parked in Diane’s
driveway. “I weighed 80 pounds at the time,” Jennifer said. “I was at death’s
door.”
She went to live in a one-room shack in a
hollow with no electricity or running water. Within nine months, she’d put on
50 pounds. “I did no medical treatment,” she said. “I didn’t change my diet.
The only thing I changed was I got out of the radiation. That’s proof enough
that [EMR] was causing my illness.”
Jennifer now lives in a one-room cabin on a
wooded ridge outside of town that she designed and built herself. Her second
home is the Green Bank Public Library, a small building situated on a hill near
the middle school. A plaque out front announces it as the 2003 Rural Library of
the Year. With eight computers hard-wired to the Internet, the library provides
many electrosensitives with their only connection to the outside world. There’s
also a kitchenette in the back where Jennifer keeps a few groceries, since she
doesn’t have a refrigerator in her cabin.
One morning, Jennifer made coffee and chatted
with Arnie Stewart, a library volunteer whom she considers her guardian angel.
“I’ve got big gossip,” whispered Arnie. “Monique married Tom.” The news came as
a shock. Monique is an outspoken EHS activist recently arrived from Florida;
Tom is a Green Bank local known for his traditional views. Later that day,
Jennifer relayed the news of Monique and Tom’s nuptials to Diane Schou.
“It’s not going to last,” Diane frowned, “Tom
doesn’t believe in [EHS].”
Diane had reason to be doubtful. As the town’s
first electrosensitive resident and the unofficial representative for
electrosensitives who came after her, she is a lightning rod for criticism.
Four years ago, Bert Schou gave a lecture at Green Bank’s senior center aimed
at educating people about EHS. It was a watershed moment in relations between
native Green Bank residents and the electrosensitive community. All the
skeptics in town showed up, including Tom. After Bert’s lecture, they accused
Diane of everything from faking her illness to purposely delaying the
construction of a local health clinic. “I was tarred and feathered,” Diane said.
“I regret that I was ever there.”
“We crucified her,” Arnie told me. “I’m sorry,
but we did.” The way he remembered it, a confrontation had been brewing for a
long time. It began when Diane asked the senior center to replace fluorescent
lights in one section so she’d have a place to eat. It escalated when she
requested that someone bring a plate to her table so that she wouldn’t be
exposed to fluorescent lights near the kitchen. It reached a climax when she
asked for gluten-free options on the menu. By the time Bert gave his lecture,
the burning issue on the minds of many in the audience wasn’t the health
effects of electromagnetic radiation--Arnie, for one, is convinced EHS is
real--but rather Diane’s constant demands for special treatment. “A woman with
one arm stood up,” Arnie recalled, “and she said, ‘Look, Diane, no one brings
my plate to my table.’ ”
Since then, relations between townsfolk and
electrosensitives have reached a kind of détente. At Diane’s request, the
minister at her church no longer uses a wireless microphone. Her dentist
switches off the fluorescent lights in his office. Cashiers at the Dollar
General sometimes bring items outside and allow electrosensitives to pay for
them in the parking lot. But Diane and other electrosensitives are alert to the
tension lurking beneath social interactions. The situation isn’t as simple as
close-minded hillbillies reacting to overbearing outsiders. It’s that in places
like Green Bank, personal relationships go back generations. Anyone moving to a
town of 143 would stand out, much less a dozen or so electrosensitives who show
up and start turning out the lights. It’s not hard to see how an “us versus
them” mentality could take root.
Photograph by Steve Featherstone
Martin Weatherall tests an electric recliner
for harmful radiation.
One afternoon, a group of us set out on a
mission of mercy. A new member of the Green Bank EHS community was having a
hard time with her home. Melissa, Jane, and Martin Weatherall, an electrosensitive
and retired policeman from Stratford, Ontario, who has been coming to Green
Bank since 2012, had offered to scan it for her. So we piled into a car and
went. Along the way, we stopped in the town of Dunmore.
Five miles south of Green Bank, Dunmore
consists of a few homes and a store situated at an intersection. The store was
the sort of all-purpose gas station/bakery/de facto town hall often found in
rural areas that haven’t been colonized by fast food chains or retail
behemoths. We ordered lunch and ate at a picnic table outside as logging trucks
rumbled by. Everybody was in high spirits. Perhaps it was the warm sunshine or
the low EMR levels. After swapping cabins with me, Melissa and Jane had been
sleeping better. Jane’s blood pressure was back down, and Melissa’s chronic
tinnitus was completely gone. “I feel good,” Martin added, “definitely better
than I do in Stratford.”
Inside the store, I asked the proprietor, who
had recently moved to the Quiet Zone, about her experience with electrosensitive
customers. She launched into a diatribe about “outsiders” who annoyed her with
their petty demands and condescending attitudes and unwillingness to fit in. I
thanked her and left, but she waved me down in the parking lot. Back in the
store, a knot of grim-faced men confronted me. The proprietor loudly proclaimed
that with the sheriff’s deputy as her witness, she was retracting everything
she’d said. Unless a camouflage T-shirt qualified as a uniform, none of the men
appeared to be officers of the law. One man took my tape recorder and barked at
me to come outside with him. As I explained the situation, his eyes narrowed
each time I used words like electromagnetic and journalist. Finally, he
returned my tape recorder, pointed his finger at my chest, and growled, “Just
be careful what you’re doing here.”
Over six days, Diane gave Melissa and Jane the
full Green Bank experience. They visited the post office and library, toured
the observatory and the town dump. They attended a mountain music jamboree
headlined by a band whose fiddler was also the GBT’s principal scientist. On
Sunday, Diane shepherded the women to two church services 15 miles apart. They
were welcomed just about everywhere. After the service at the Church of the
Nazarene in Durbin, the organist asked Jane what it felt like to have EHS. She
listened intently to Jane’s reply and posed a question that electrosensitives
have been asking for years. “They make allotments for all kinds of ailments,”
the organist said. “Why can’t they recognize this one?”
Jane didn’t have an answer--because there isn’t
one. Without an official medical diagnosis, it’s difficult for EHS sufferers to
claim benefits from insurance companies and government health agencies. Only
Sweden recognizes EHS as a functional impairment, equivalent to a disability.
But activists are beginning to have an impact on attitudes toward EHS and
EMR-related issues, such as the use of wireless networks in public schools.
Some day they hope that the medical establishment will treat EHS like other
mysterious syndromes, such as fibromyalgia. They won a moral victory in 2011,
when the WHO classified RF radiation as “possibly carcinogenic” in response to
its Interphone study, which found a 40 percent greater risk for certain brain
tumors at the highest exposure levels. (Scientists, however, did not find an
increased incidence in cellphone users overall.) Then, in February of this
year, France restricted the use of RF devices in daycare centers, citing a
precautionary approach to exposure. Those gains aside, few if any studies are
taking seriously the issue of EHS, and the inexorable expansion of wireless
technologies does not appear to be slowing. Barring a breakdown in relations
between electrosensitives and townsfolk or defunding of the GBT, Green Bank
will continue to attract technological refugees searching for a safe haven from
the electrosmog they feel is smothering the rest of the world.
Electrosensitives
fervently believe that it's just a matter of time before the rest of the world
catches on to what they already know.
Near the end of Melissa and Jane’s visit, Diane
hosted a potluck dinner for them at her house, a large brick colonial on a
wooded hill overlooking a bend on a dark country road. Electrosensitives showed
up with bottles of wine and covered dishes. Faces lit by flickering
candlelight, they gathered around Diane’s kitchen table and talked long into
the night about the usual topics: rumors of a Wi-Fi network that the
observatory was installing for town residents, old Soviet studies on microwave
radiation, and the looming wireless pandemic. Everyone contributed a cautionary
tale about “normal” people they knew--a friend, a neighbor, a co-worker--who
were suddenly struck low by an overdose of EMR and are now struggling with
health problems. Electrosensitives fervently believe that it’s just a matter of
time before the rest of the world catches on to what they already know.
“Your body is getting affected--it’s just going
to take a few years to really know it,” Martin warned me, “unless you end up
like us, and then you’ll wish you’d never seen wireless stuff.”
I asked the group what they preferred to be
called--electrosensitives? EHS’ers?
“I prefer injured or harmed,” Diane said.
“That gets people very nervous,” another person
said.
“Well they should be nervous,” Diane said.
“They could be harmed too.”
“EMF people,” Jennifer offered. “Electrocuted
people,” Martin deadpanned, and everybody laughed.
Although the conspiratorial tone got a little
thick at times, the electrosensitives sitting around Diane’s kitchen table
weren’t technophobic Luddites or doomsday preppers nursing violent fantasies of
social collapse. Their conversation seemed quaint in its directness, an
artifact from a time when communication between people was unmediated by texts,
tweets, and Facebook updates thumbed on smartphones. Over dessert, Jane
announced that she was getting a realtor to look for houses in Green Bank. As
for Melissa, she didn’t even want to go home. “I feel like I can finally have
my life back,” she said.
Despite its abundant natural beauty and rural
charm, electrosensitives come to Green Bank because they have no other place to
go. Unless you know somebody, it’s almost impossible to find a job or a place
to live there. Some electrosensitives leave town soon after they arrive, unable
to cope with the remoteness of the place. But Diane Schou has plans to make
Green Bank more accessible. Through a nonprofit, she bought 14 acres of land to
establish an electrosensitive retreat. Money for the property came from private
donations. On my last morning in Green Bank, she took me to see the land. I
followed her car down a narrow dirt lane set between double-wide homes. We came
to a clearing scented by wood smoke and pine needles. A small cabin stood at
the edge of the clearing.
“If people find that they’re affected by [EMR],
they can get away from it, get it turned off, recover,” Diane said. That’s how
it worked for her. Living in the Quiet Zone, away from the cell towers, has
allowed Diane to recuperate. Now, she can tolerate limited excursions into the
wireless world to visit her son in Baltimore. “You might be able to go back
home and take cautions and be able to live maybe a normal life,” she said,
pausing. “Maybe. Cautiously.”
Diane walked around the clearing, gesturing to
places where she planned to build structures. Cabins over here. A communal area
over there. In this spot, a shielded computer room. Other board members of the
nonprofit vetoed the computer room. Too much EMR, they said. But Diane
insisted. People have lives. They might want to keep working or email or Skype
with their families. It’s a community, not a cult.
“That’s why I call [EHS] technological
leprosy,” Diane said. “We can’t be with other people in society. We have to
live like lepers. Technology is wonderful stuff--if we aren’t harmed by it.”
Leaving town, the GBT’s big white dish floated
in my rearview mirror like a harvest moon shining in the clear autumn sky. At
an intersection somewhere in the mountains, I realized that I’d left my road map
at the cabin. My cellphone didn’t work, and the radio played only static. I
couldn’t remember the last time I’d gotten lost, but I knew I’d left the Quiet
Zone when I heard a preacher’s voice cutting through the static on the radio.
“You see, our problem is not our weaknesses,” he bellowed. “Our problem is not
staying plugged in! We need to plug into our power source, which is God!”
I turned the radio off, relishing the silence
while it lasted.
This article was originally published in
the April 2015 issue of Popular
Science, under the title "Greetings From The Quiet Zone.”
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