Nov092009
The (semi-serous) plan to put Winooski, Vt., under a big dome
Filed under General, Weather climate by david brooks at 2:11 pm
Via Slashdot, I found this wonderful tale in h+ magazine about a ’70s-era plan, which sounds like it was sort of tongue-in-cheek and sort of serious, to put a dome over Winooski, Vt., as a way to reduce the cost of dealing with winter. (This was during the first Oil Crisis, when anything to reduce oil usage was listened to.)
The story is a riot, including tidbits like this:
Naturally the media was full of questions, and Tigan and his staff had few real answers. Basically, he says, they made it up on the fly. “They asked how high it would be, and we said 250 feet, so it wouldn’t block planes but clear the town’s highest building (eleven stories). Would it be clear or opaque? ‘Of course you’ll be able to see through it,’ we said. What about automobile exhaust? ‘Oh, we’ll have electric cars or monorails inside.’
There’s probably a lesson in there for various alternative-energy plans we hear about these days.
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