![enola gay smoke amazon enola gay smoke amazon](https://cdn.gorillasurplus.com/images/products/large/RFI10666.jpg)
At the time that the NSA Data Center opened, Utah was among the states with the highest water usage per capita.Īdmittedly, this is in part because that story is far more complicated than grandstanding legislation, and it’s a story that is not only Utah’s. There was considerably less national coverage when the proposed legislation failed a few months later, and there wasn’t much context provided at the time as to how that drought happened in the first place.
![enola gay smoke amazon enola gay smoke amazon](https://www.airrattle.com/v/vspfiles/photos/ENOLASMOKEGRENADEEG18BLUE-2.jpg)
At that time, much ado was made of the 1.7 million gallons of water the NSA reportedly used on a daily basis in the midst of a statewide drought, as well as an attempt in the state legislature to restrict the data center's access to water. The city also cut the NSA an extremely generous deal for its water rates back in 2011, a decision that, at least on a national stage, proved pretty unpopular in 2014. Suburban development near the NSA Data Center (Ingrid Burrington) While the new infrastructure is welcomed, those new businesses don’t appear to have materialized. That infrastructure buildout included a new water line that city officials hoped would spur more real-estate development, maybe attracting the government contractors who tend to multiply within a five-mile radius of any intelligence-agency outpost. The NSA Data Center had a lot of infrastructure needs, some of which the city could provide and some of which would need to be built out to service the data center. Blessed are the meek, Werner whispered bitterly as I passed a Mormon church, a lone blue convertible in its parking lot.Īt the time that the city of Bluffdale approved the construction of the NSA Data Center, it seemed like a pretty appealing development. Idling at the corner of Patriot Drive and Horizon Drive, I continued to imagine Werner Herzog narration. I drove through one of them in search of a dirt road toward higher ground from which to view the NSA Data Center, but upon seeing the road in person didn’t trust my two-wheel drive to survive the journey.
#Enola gay smoke amazon full
South of Bluffdale, there are a number of suburban development projects, full of half-finished houses bearing soap-opera names: The Ranches, Independence Point, Bluffdale Heights. The NSA Data Center is usually described as being “in Bluffdale.” Technically it is in Bluffdale, but it is easy to mistake it as being on property that’s connected to Camp Williams, a National Guard base that really only touches the southern edge of Bluffdale. When the NSA Data Center was initially being built, the agency worked with the university to develop a data-center-engineering certificate program, essentially building a pipeline for students to continue to support Utah's data-center industry, with one data center in particular presumably needing a lot of support (U of U also has a Big Data certificate program weirdly, neither of these programs currently require any ethics coursework). Today, the University of Utah's computer-science program continues to have interesting DoD ties. Other U of U computer-science alumnae have been involved in the formation of companies like Silicon Graphics, Pixar, and Adobe. They’re pretty amazing documents of Internet and computer-graphics history-one features an abstract of Alan Kay’s dissertation. He brought his DoD connections with him, and an ARPA contract named “Graphical Man/Machine Communications” that funded a lot of the department's early activities.Įvans's reports to the DoD and papers published under the contract are available online via the university library. The U of U lured him back to Salt Lake to create and chair their new computer-science program. Evans, a Utah native who had been teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, when ARPA was just getting started. Its presence in that initial constellation (the only non-California node in the network) was largely due to the efforts of David C. That long and distinguished history really kicked off around 1969, when the University of Utah was made one of the four original nodes of ARPANET. It’s also in proximity to a lot of Internet backbone, and the state “has a long and distinguished history in the high-tech industry,” which presumably makes it easier to find skilled IT workers. Instead, they mention that it's generally untouched by natural disasters, and it’s a pretty secure region given that it’s very isolated and spacious. These many DoD outposts aren’t why the Economic Development Corporation of Utah says the state’s a great place for data centers.