{"id":3124,"date":"2008-02-04T09:52:49","date_gmt":"2008-02-04T14:52:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2008\/02\/the_things_that_weve_learnt_are_no_longer_enough.html"},"modified":"2008-02-04T09:52:49","modified_gmt":"2008-02-04T14:52:49","slug":"the_things_that_weve_learnt_are_no_longer_enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2008\/02\/the_things_that_weve_learnt_are_no_longer_enough.html","title":{"rendered":"The Things That We’ve Learnt Are No Longer Enough"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Talk of the Town tests the Empire-State-Building-as-electrical-Bermuda-Triangle theory<\/a>:<\/p>\n

There are real differences between the original Bermuda Triangle (between Bermuda, Florida, and Puerto Rico) and the one that, as the News reported last week, plagues a five-block radius around the Empire State Building. The first affects planes and ships, and is attributable to (depending on your point of view) ocean-floor gases, magnetic fields, wind patterns, U.F.O.s, or a time warp. The second takes down cars. As soon as vehicles approach the Empire State Building, things get weird: locks stop functioning; engines die. The cause, some experts believe, is the giant cluster of antennas at the top of the building, which interferes with cars’ remote key-lock systems. In the case of both Triangles, the victims and the authorities can’t agree. Empire State Building officials deny the claims; doormen and tow-truck drivers stand behind them. “Every day it’s at least four breakdowns,” Rony Yaakobovitch, the president of the neighborhood AAA service, said.<\/p>\n

In a city full of malevolent electricity — cell-phone dead zones, electrified manhole covers — the antenna theory sounded plausible. “It’s possible,” Brian Klopfer, a mechanic with Union Electronics, who works on electric-key and alarm systems, said. Klopfer explained that many alarm and key-lock systems use radio signals, which can go haywire around large antennas. Car alarms, he added, often have a “starter kill” built into them, which shuts off the engine. Paul Diament, a professor at Columbia who specializes in electromagnetics, confirmed this but was skeptical about the Empire State Building’s role: “Blaming the antenna — you might as well blame the little green men on Mars.” More likely, he said, something else in the area, perhaps ground-level electrical equipment, had caused “sparking.” But to know for sure, he said, “it would have to be tested.”<\/p>\n

With no official studies on the horizon, a highly scientific Talk of the Town field test was arranged. The equipment: an Electrosmog meter ($199), a remote-control-type thing with a digital readout topped by a yellow plastic ball, which, according to an Internet vender, is used to measure radio-wave pollution; a test vehicle (a 2005 Ford Crown Victoria taxi, with remote key lock); and a pilot (Michael Gati, a cabdriver for thirty years). The experimenter, remembering that Columbus’s compass had behaved erratically in the Bermuda Triangle, brought one, too. <\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

Electrosmog readings were high on Park Avenue, very high at the Polish Consulate, at Thirty-seventh and Madison, and low-to-normal outside Empire Erotica, at Thirty-third and Broadway. Then, on the ground floor of the Empire State Building, a breakthrough: the Electrosmog meter dropped to zero, and the compass, placed on the floor in the middle of a hallway, read backward — South pointed North. No test results could be gathered from the top of the building. The Electrosmog meter was confiscated by security guards before it could get through a metal detector, and the experimenter, after being made to wait for a supervisor, was asked, “What are you doing in here with an R.F. meter?” The supervisor called the corporate office on his BlackBerry. It seemed like a good time to vanish without a trace.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Talk of the Town tests the Empire-State-Building-as-electrical-Bermuda-Triangle theory: There are real differences between the original Bermuda Triangle (between Bermuda, Florida, and Puerto Rico) and the one that, as the News reported last week, plagues a five-block radius around the Empire State Building. The first affects planes and ships, and is attributable to (depending on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-followed_by_a_perplexed_stroke_of_the_chin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}