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The Congressman Who Went Off the Grid
The Congressman Who Went Off the Grid
When Roscoe Bartlett was in Congress, he latched onto a particularly apocalyptic issue, one almost no one else ever seemed to talk about: Americas dangerously vulnerable power grid. In speech after late-night speech on the House floor, Bartlett hectored the nearly empty chamber: If the United States doesnt do something to protect the grid, and soon, a terrorist or an act of nature will put an end to life as we know it.
Bartlett loved to conjure doomsday visions: Think post-Sandy New York City without powerbut spread over a much larger area for months at a time. He once recounted a conversation he claimed to have had with unnamed Russian officials about how they could take out the United States: They would detonate a nuclear weapon high above your country, he recalled them saying, and shut down your power gridand your communicationsfor six months or so.
Bartlett never gained much traction with his scary talk of electromagnetic pulses and solar storms. More immediate concerns always seemed to preoccupy his colleagues, or perhaps Bartletts obsessions just sounded more like quackery than real science, even coming from a former Navy engineer who had worked on the space race. Whatever the reason, Congresss failure to act is no longer Bartletts problem. The octogenarian Republican from western Marylandmore than once labeled the oddest congressmanfound himself gerrymandered out of office a year ago and promptly decided to take action on the warnings others wouldnt heed, retreating to a remote property in the mountains of West Virginia where he lives with no phone service, no connection to outside power and no municipal plumbing. Having failed to safeguard the power grid for the rest of the country, Bartlett has taken himself completely off the grid. He has finally done what he pleaded in vain for others to do: to become, as he put it in a 2009 documentary, independent of the system.
I visited Bartlett this past fall, following a set of maze-like directionstake a series of different forks in the road and look for the one paved driveway that turns off a narrow, rocky dirt roadas I climbed to nearly 4,000 feet, one of the highest U.S. elevations east of the Rocky Mountains. I lost cell phone service halfway into the four-hour drive from Washington and never got it back. The nearest shopping mall is more than an hours drive away.
-snip-
Full THREE PAGE article here: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/roscoe-bartlett-congressman-off-the-grid-101720.html?hp=f1
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The Congressman Who Went Off the Grid (Original Post)
Tx4obama
Jan 2014
OP
Interesting. I envy him. But he is fooling himself if he thinks he is independent. nt
bemildred
Jan 2014
#2
One of the most interesting characters out of government I have ever read about.
Jefferson23
Jan 2014
#3
Control-Z
(15,682 posts)1. K&R&Bookmarking
for the morning.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)2. Interesting. I envy him. But he is fooling himself if he thinks he is independent. nt
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)3. One of the most interesting characters out of government I have ever read about.
Thank you for posting this. His background, education, family history..amazing story.
I hope the author goes back next year and checks in on him, for an update...fascinating.
K&R