Yup...they're dancin' in the streets of Socorro...
Wanna hear a cool urban legend?
When I was going to school there (New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology; at the time, one of only about 10 schools that had an undergraduate Computer Science degree), they told the following story:
Ma Bell (later USWest, then SBC I believe) had a switchboard there, manned by a single operator. Before they lit the Trinity site device, they were to call the operator and have her (it was always a 'her' back then) disconnect and ground the phone system (so the EMP wouldn't fry it). Well, the time of detonation arrived, and from the site they rang up the operator. No answer. They rang again, and again, no answer. They ended up sending someone into town (about a 30 min. drive on the "roads" of the time) to find out what was the problem. They found the operator asleep. She was awakened, the phone system secured, and the rest, as they say, is history.
(But from that day forward, no telephone operators were stationed in Socorro; all operator interface was moved to Belen, some 45 miles to the north....)
(Is it true? I dunno, but as is the case with all urban legends, there's enough of a "ring" of truth to it to be quite possible. Youd have to look at the logs to see if there was a 1/2 hour delay in detonation...)
jb4
"I remember Harry S. Truman's sign on his desk. 'The buck stops here.' Strange how those words, while still true, mean something completely different today." -- Brandioch
