Electricity, Trinity and a poll

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Hi subscribers – and welcome to the new ones!

This week ending today saw two new posts go up on the DT Blog. The one on Thursday marked the 75th anniversary of the very first nuclear test in history at the “Trinity” site in New Mexico, USA. This was the culmination of the Manhattan Project and in a way the starting gun for the Atomic Age. The post was illustrated both with historical photos from back then as well as with several one I took myself when I visited the site in 2012 on one of its rare open days.

On Monday I had finished the latest batch of reconstructions from my offline-stored material from my purged DT Facebook page, namely for the year 2017. As I worked on that I noticed that during that year the page had various intriguing themed weeks, so I took one of them, possibly one of the least expected, namely “dark tourism and electricity” and turned that into a blog post for Wednesday. The photo above was taken from that series and shows part of the huge Duga over-the-horizon radar array within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. This spooky-looking monster of vintage technology was built close to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant for a reason: it needed vast amounts of electricity!

Other elements of the electricity theme were: an electrified barbed-wire fence at the Groß-Rosen concentration camp, an electric chair on display at the West Virginia Penitentiary, the world's highest voltage transformer station near Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan (a place with a dark nature both in terms of its gulag past and in terms of current environmental issues), and finished on a smaller scale, electrically speaking, namely with an eerie image of a lone light bulb inside the former Stasi prison in Dresden, Germany.

At the bottom of the post I also called a poll! I suggested four further themes that could be turned into blog posts and asked readers to pick the one they'd most like to see materialize next. Please take part in this poll! You can vote either by putting your choice in a comment to the post, or by replying to this newsletter email.

These are the four options:

a) dark tourism and animals

b) dark tourism and ash

c) dark tourism and bridges

d) dark tourism and walls