Camp Hero Drew 41 Kilowatt-Hours A Day. A Family Home Draws Thirty.
Seventeen years of the utility's billing records for both service points at Montauk, released after appeal: 1.2 megawatts while the radar transmitted, then six unbroken years of a dehumidifier and a well pump.
MONTAUK, New York — Between March 1981 and the transfer of the site out of the Air Force inventory in 1987, the two electricity meters at Camp Hero registered an average of 41 kilowatt-hours a day between them.
A three-bedroom house on the same feeder, in the same years, drew about thirty.
The figures come from seventeen years of the utility's retained commercial billing records for both service points, refused on request, released after an eleven-month appeal, and published in full with this story.
What the radar cost to run
The AN/FPS-35 search radar on the bluff was a genuinely enormous machine, and it drew what its manuals say it should draw.
On a transmit day in May 1976 the site metered 14,400 kilowatt-hours — twelve hours at 1.2 megawatts. On a manned standby day in June 1979, with the antenna turning but not radiating, it metered 2,180.
There is nothing hidden in the operating years. The bills track the operating schedule so closely that a reader with the maintenance calendar could reconstruct the duty roster from the meter alone.
The fall
The last logged transmit is 18 February 1981. Eight hours, 9,600 kilowatt-hours.
After that the line goes flat and stays flat. Not one month in the following six years averages above 47 kilowatt-hours a day. The highest single day in the whole period is 96, on 9 January 1984, during a cold snap.
Somebody was there the whole time
The site was not abandoned. It was kept.
Aldo Vincent Pisani held a caretaker's contract at $9,400 a year from 1981 until the disposal. His time sheets, his maintenance log and six years of Friday hours-run readings survive in a carton in his daughter's garage in Southampton, which she lent us and we photographed and gave back.
The log records two machines running unattended. A 1.1-kilowatt dehumidifier in the transmitter hall, to keep the condensation off equipment nobody was ever going to switch on again. A well pump on a float switch.
Add the dehumidifier's logged hours, the pump's, the guard shack's baseboard heaters, a photocell lamp on the gate and the trickle chargers on two vehicle batteries, and the arithmetic lands within four kilowatt-hours of the meter, every month, for six years.
The hum
Fourteen people in Montauk described the sound to us. We asked what they remembered before we asked for dates, and nine of them could anchor the memory to something datable.
Their dates cluster in the summers of 1983 and 1984. So do the dehumidifier's hours: the log's counter runs hardest from June to September, and hardest of all in those two years, which were humid.
The transmitter hall is thirty-four metres of bare concrete. Our acoustician measured a reverberation time of 8.6 seconds in it this July, with a modelled low-frequency emphasis in the region a compressor of that size occupies.
She also told us, in writing, that a matching date is not a matching sound, and we have printed her caution because she is right and because we did not put it high enough in the story.
What the meters cannot do
A generator leaves no bill. We will say that as plainly as the people who disagree with us say it.
The disposal file lists a 250-kilowatt standby diesel; a 1984 condition survey calls its tank drained; we found no fuel deliveries in anything we obtained. None of that is proof, and readers who have written to us about radar emissions and health at the site are directed to PX-2161, which is a different question and a better documented one.
What this desk takes from it
The site after February 1981 was a man on a modest contract, a household dehumidifier and a well pump.
That is a completely ordinary cause and it is not a boring one. A dehumidifier cycling on and off in an empty hardened hall with a nine-second echo, at one in the morning, four hundred metres from a road, is a genuinely strange sound.
Doreen Achatz-Lindo, who heard it and whose letter is below, says we have matched a date to a date and called it an explanation. Our own acoustician told us the same thing in July.
We think the explanation holds. We are printing both of them saying it might not.
The six o'clock edition
Three stories a morning, in your inbox before the coffee is made.
Sources & Method
We asked the successor utility for the billing history of both Camp Hero service points, were refused, appealed, and got seventeen years of it eleven months later. We then read the Air Force disposal file for the installed plant, borrowed a caretaker's own log from his daughter's garage, and set his weekly hours-run readings against the dates fourteen residents gave us for the sound. Last, we paid an acoustician to go and measure the room.
Who we spoke to
- Retained commercial billing records, two service points, Camp Hero, 1970–1987, The successor utility's archived microfiche billing history. Requested under the state Freedom of Information Law, refused as commercially confidential, appealed, released in full after eleven months September 2025 – August 2026 Two accounts: the operations building and the guard shack. Both run continuously to the transfer in 1987. Copying fee $618, paid.
- Air Force real-property disposal file, Montauk Air Force Station, 411 pages, including the excess-property inventory of installed plant. Obtained under freedom of information; released with four pages withheld under an exemption we are appealing March 2026 Lists a 250 kW standby diesel and its day tank, marked in a 1984 condition survey as 'out of service, tank drained'.
- Roseanne Pisani-Kirk, Daughter of Aldo Vincent Pisani, site caretaker under contract, 1981–1987. Interviewed twice at her house; lent us a carton of her father's papers, which we photographed page by page and returned by hand May and June 2026 The carton holds his time sheets, his maintenance log, and the hours-run readings he copied off two machines every Friday for six years.
- Dr. Sunniva Achterberg-Ruiz, Architectural acoustician. Commissioned to measure the transmitter hall as it stands and to model the plant listed in the log; her report is published entire July 2026 Measured a reverberation time of 8.6 seconds in the empty hall. Warned us, in writing, that matching dates is not the same as matching a sound.
- Fourteen Montauk residents, People who described the hum to us without being asked whether they had heard one. Interviewed in person over two visits; asked first what they remembered and only afterwards for dates April and June 2026 Nine could anchor their memory to a datable event — a wedding, a storm, a job. Five could not, and we have not used their dates for anything.
Documents
- PX-2161 — Cumulative radiofrequency exposure study — signed protocol, published before recruitment accepted
What we could not confirm
- A generator leaves no bill. The disposal file lists a 250 kW standby diesel and a 1984 survey calls its tank drained, and we found no fuel deliveries to the site in any record we obtained. But fuel bought on a defence account would not appear in a utility's billing microfiche or in a county file, and the absence of a receipt is not the absence of a machine running.
- Whether two service points are all of them. The utility says its records show two and no more. A feed taken from a different substation, or a line billed to another installation entirely, would not be in the file we appealed for, and we have no way to test that from the outside.
- The residents' dates. These are recollections gathered in 2026 about 1983 and 1984. Nine of the fourteen could tie the memory to something datable and nine is a small number. Our own acoustician's caution stands: the duty cycles and the remembered summers coincide, and coincidence at this resolution is weaker evidence than we would like it to be.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
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The Meridian TelegraphTHE BILLS THEY FORGOT TO SHRED: SEVENTEEN YEARS UNDER MONTAUK
Read the 1976 transmit-day figure as evidence of a programme and the 1981 collapse as evidence of a cover.
Had that we did not
The 1.2 megawatt figure, correctly, and a genuinely useful explanation of how the radar was rated.
Left out
The six years afterwards, which are in the same table, three columns to the right.
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The Hollow PostForty-One Kilowatt-Hours Is Exactly What You Would Want On The Bill
Argued that a low meter reading is what a concealed programme would produce, and that the records therefore prove the opposite of what they say.
Had that we did not
The correct and important point that a generator leaves no bill, which we also make, lower down than they do.
Left out
The caretaker's time sheets, his maintenance log, his hours-run counters, and his daughter, who is in the phone book.
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They Buriedthis newspaperCamp Hero Drew 41 Kilowatt-Hours A Day. A Family Home Draws Thirty.
Got the meters, then got the man who was on the site, then went and measured the room the sound came out of.
Had that we did not
All seventeen years of billing in full, the disposal file's plant inventory, and the log's duty cycles against the dates residents gave us.
Left out
We asked fourteen people what they heard and then explained it to them, and our own acoustician warned us in an email that a matching date is not a matching sound. That email is in our files and not in this story. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
Right of Reply
They Buried contacted Doreen Achatz-Lindo, 68, of Montauk; one of the fourteen on 9 April 2026 in person, again on 3 August with the full draft, the billing table, the caretaker's log and the acoustician's report. Replied by telephone on 12 August 2026 and then in writing, asking that the written version run and that nothing be trimmed. Printed unedited.
I gave you two hours at my kitchen table and you have given me back a dehumidifier, and I want to be careful here, because I do not think you are wrong. I think you are answering a question nobody in this town was asking.
Here is what I told you and what you printed accurately. In the summers of 1983 and 1984 I was twenty-five, I worked the late shift at a restaurant on the highway, and I drove home past the fence four nights a week between one and two in the morning. There was a sound. It came up through the car. I could feel it in the door panel before I could hear it, and when I stopped the car and got out it was not louder outside, which is the part I have never been able to explain to anybody, including you.
You have found a compressor. Fine. I accept that a compressor was running in that hall on the nights I say I heard something, because you have the man's own handwriting on a Friday-by-Friday hours counter and I am not going to argue with a hours counter.
But notice what you have actually done. You matched a date to a date. You did not match a sound to a sound. Your own acoustician told you that and you have printed her saying it, in small type, at the bottom, and then you wrote a headline about a family home.
I will tell you the thing that annoys me most and it is not about the radar. For forty years the people who came out here with cameras treated us as though we were either liars or mystics, and now a careful newspaper has come out and treated us as an acoustics problem. Both of those are ways of not simply believing that a person heard something and does not know what it was. I do not know what it was. I have never once said it was a machine that bends time. I said there was a sound. My mother heard it. The man who ran the tackle shop heard it and he was deaf in one ear and it drove him out of his mind.
And I want the readers to sit with the picture you have drawn without noticing that you have drawn it, because it is the strangest thing in your whole article. A hardened concrete hall, thirty-four metres long, entirely empty, unheated, with a nine-second echo, and inside it one household dehumidifier running eleven hours a day for six years so that a building nobody was ever going to use again would not rust. And one man driving up there to write down the numbers. That is not an explanation of a strange sound. That is a strange sound, with an invoice attached.
If you want to do us a service, print the caretaker's name properly. Aldo. He came into the restaurant. He tipped on the tax.
Published unedited under our right-of-reply guarantee.
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