Along the Batvia Kill
Heading along the Batvia Kill on NY 23 outside of Windham.
Heading along the Batvia Kill on NY 23 outside of Windham.
The flares were so powerful that "people in the northeastern U.S. could read newspaper print just from the light of the aurora," Daniel Baker, of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, said at a geophysics meeting last December.
In addition, the geomagnetic disturbances were strong enough that U.S. telegraph operators reported sparks leaping from their equipment—some bad enough to set fires, said Ed Cliver, a space physicist at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in Bedford, Massachusetts.
In 1859, such reports were mostly curiosities. But if something similar happened today, the world's high-tech infrastructure could grind to a halt.
The farm — taking up around 198 acres and owned by 306 Maple Road, LLC — is now directly on Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy’s (MHLC) radar because it recently launched a campaign to raise $1.2 million to purchase the property and preserve it forever as it faces the risk of development. This campaign has been asking the community for generous monetary donations since this past June and it needs to receive enough funds by spring 2020.