The Mysterious Blue-Lit Building
Just across the street from my house is a somewhat run-down structure that is the home of a few businesses. None of those businesses have bothered to put any signage on the side of the building facing the road, however, so just what goes on in there has an air of mystery. This is compounded by the blue glow that comes out of the windows in the evenings. Perhaps it is a sign of economic decline, but back in the day more of the windows glowed blue.
Whatever is inside, they make no attempt to hide it. I look in the windows closest to my house and I see a mostly empty room, coated with tile, a fire extinguisher on the wall, and on the wall near the ceiling a fixture with UV tubes bathing the whole room with that haunting glow.
When I first moved in to my place here it was winter, and I expected to soon see plant life inside, getting a jump on the growing season. Nope. During the course of my extremely casual observation, nothing has changed inside. Not that my observation has been terribly diligent; there is a strong feeling in these parts that one should mind their own business, and on this quiet street there is no better way to summon a pedestrian than to pull out a camera with the intent to take a picture of something that is not my business.
Note that this picture is taken from the driveway to my house; the gate in the foreground is the one I pass through to every day (every day I leave my flat, anyway). If those strange lights are doing something like, say, incubating Godzilla eggs, I’m in trouble.
A science lesson for the kids!
I debated the use of “UV Tubes” as the description of the lights; most people would call them “blue fluorescent lights” or something like that, but that would be incorrect, since there is no fluorescent material in these lights. Flourescent lights have a coating that converts the ultraviolet light the tubes produce into visible light. The conversion process is called fluorescence.
Here in the U.S., the presence of UV lamps such as you describe is frequently associated with marijuana-growing operations. Law enforcement agencies have begun using equipment that detects the operation of such lamps, even in hidden locations such as basements, especially in Colorado and Arizona.
This has led to controversy, as UV lamps are definitely NOT illegal, but law enforcement agencies will use the presence of such lamps as evidence of illegal activities to try to get a search warrant.
Some civil libertarians have taken to putting UV lamps in their homes even though they are not doing anything illegal, as a form of protest. The idea is that if law enforcement people keep “raiding” homes that turn out not to have anything illegal going on, maybe the world will see that search warrants based on the presence of UV lamps constitute an unconstitutional invasion of privacy.
I have no idea whether there’s a similar controversy going on in the Czech Republic, so I don’t know whether the UV lamps across the road from you might be involved in a similar protest.
The other possibility I can think of is that the lamps are being used to disinfect the spaces that they illuminate, but I don’t know why such disinfection might be needed.