Starburst

The next big solar storm could devastate our power grid and communication systems. Are we prepared?

- By Kathryn Schulz

Ken Tegnell's first home was on Alcatraz. At the time this was in the nineteen-fifties-there was, in addition to the federal penitentiary, a preschool, a post office, and housing for prison employees and their family members. That included Tegnell, who lived with his mother and grandfather, a guard, while his father was stationed in Korea. The whole of Alcatraz Island is less than a tenth of a square mile, so, despite all the security measures and DO NOT ENTER signs, the inmates and civilians were never very far apart. Yet even given the proximity to the likes of Whitey Bulger, it was a peaceful place to live. The view was spectacular, almost none of the non-incarcerated residents locked their doors, and almost all of them knew one another and shared the camaraderie of an unusual identity. We were an odd group of people,Tegnell jokes, and that's why I'm strange the way I am.

When Tegnell's father returned from Korea, the family moved away, and then moved often. But eventually Tegnell returned to the Bay Area-this time to attend Berkeley, which, by the late nineteen-sixties, was another island of odd people. While taking an astronomy course there, he attended a lecture by a not yet famous scientist named Carl Sagan. Interested in things that happen in the sky and unmoved by the hippie culture around him, Tegnell joined the Air Force, in 1974. The military taught him to use telescopes and radio arrays, then sent him to the Learmonth Solar Observatory, at the northwestern tip of Australia, to gather data about the sun. He served two tours there, twelve hours from anything that could be called a city-a godforsaken place, as Tegnell recalls it, but gorgeous, with beautiful beaches, terrific fishing, and almost no rainfall year-round. Whether working or playing, he spent his days there looking at the sun.