Michelle Oehlerking, a Motorola executive, recently moved from Chicago to Hawthorn Woods to give her two young children what she thought was a healthy environment, only to find out that Commonwealth Edison wants to build electric power lines within a football field of her home and within 100 feet of the homes of her neighbors across the street.
“We live in a village where we have to tell them where we’re planting a bush, but Commonwealth Edison can just bulldoze their way through here because they own the right-of-way along a very old railroad track,” she said.
“It doesn’t make any sense. This has become a tremendously sad thing for us. If this goes through, we will move and half of our neighbors will move because of fear of cancer. We all have young children. But we’re organizing and we’re trying to fight this. No one else is looking out for the health of the citizens.”
Oehlerking and her neighbors are not alone, in Chicago or the nation.
Two and a half years ago when Commonwealth Edison proposed construction of a 138,000-volt overhead transmission circuit that would pass through a corridor of Lake Villa near hundreds of homes, the Lake Villa Intermediate School, several playgrounds, and the shores of two lakes, it sent a jolt through the community. It didn’t take long for the citizens of Lake Villa and Antioch Townships in suburban Lake County to get mad-and get organized.
“We asked Commonwealth Edison why they were proposing this and they said it was because Lake Villa and Antioch townships are in need of greater electrical capacity,” said Jim Pierce, one of the founders of Citizens Against Unsafe Electricity, or CAUSE. “We went to the Northeast Illinois Planning Commission and found out that the population could only increase by 50 percent by the year 2010. We thought we didn’t need eight or nine times more electrical capacity. Then we really started digging into the issue.”
Nationally, there’s no more volatile issue facing public utilities than electromagnetic fields, or EMFs. Electromagnetic fields, invisible waves emitted by electrical power lines, electrical appliances and computer terminals, have been linked to leukemia, brain tumors, breast and skin cancer, and reproductive problems.
What’s at stake from the citizens’ point of view is the health of their children, their own health, their property values and their right to have what one man called “peaceful enjoyment” in his home. Consequently, citizens protest groups have been springing up from New York to Washington state. In northern Illinois, nine suburban protest groups are established or being organized in Wheaton/Warrenville, central Kane County, Lake Villa, Palatine, Lake Zurich, Bolingbrook, Libertyville, Hawthorn Woods and Long Grove.
The utility industry generally has contended that electromagnetic fields given off by power lines do not pose significant health hazards. Results of studies on the matter have been mixed, sometimes depending on who financed the research, though a 1990 Environmental Protection Agency report concluded: “With our current understanding we can identify 60 Hz magnetic fields from power lines and perhaps other sources in the home as a possible, but not proven, cause of cancer in people.”
But citizens groups have been galvanized by recent events in Sweden. Last fall officials of Sweden’s National Board for Industrial and Technological Development announced that they intended to “act on the assumption that there is a connection between exposure to power frequency magnetic fields and cancer, in particular childhood cancer.”
This new policy was prompted by the results of two major epidemiological studies that demonstrated that exposure to electromagnetic fields at home and at work was linked to the development of leukemia. The two studies were conducted with the financial support and cooperation of the Swedish National Board for Industrial and Technical Development, governmental health agencies and the Swedish utility industries.
In contrast, the American utility industry and governmental health agencies have been reluctant to deal with the problem, but citizens groups across the country are determined to force them to confront the power-line health issue.
“We have done everything we can to educate ourselves on the electrical magnetic field issue,” said Jim Pierce of CAUSE. “We are familiar with the global research that has been done over the last 25 or 30 years and in particular how that research is interpreted differently by foreign researchers and independent university researchers in the U.S. and by the utilities, particularly Commonwealth Edison.
“We have hired experts in the biological effects of electromagnetic fields. We’ve hired engineers who will assess the existing electromagnetic fields in that corridor and project what the levels would be if the transmission lines were built and all the electrical load connected, how it would affect the environment and whether it would be fit for human habitation.”
Issue affects everyone
There are so many citizens groups in the Chicago area that they have their own umbrella organization, Better Electric Safety Today, as a means of sharing information and eliminating duplication of effort. “Every time Commonwealth Edison proposes a new power line, a group forms and we expand our ranks,” said Phil Lazar, a city planner and president of the organization based in his Aurora home.
The issue cuts across all socioeconomic lines, uniting plumbers and business executives, real estate brokers and factory workers, homemakers and land developers.
“It’s become very clear that radiation from electric power lines is hazardous to people’s health,” Lazar said. “This has been recognized by Sweden, which is moving and removing power lines. They’re taking it very seriously, and we believe Commonwealth Edison should do the same. It hasn’t been proven that overhead power lines are needed. There is no serious energy conservation, just inserts stuck in with the electric bills.
“If, after certain energy conservation measures are implemented, it’s found that new power lines are needed, then they should be properly buried, which would solve the magnetic radiation problem. Commonwealth Edison says it would cost $4.5 million per mile to bury the power lines-sometimes they say more-but an official study by Washington state says it would cost $1.5 million to $2 million per mile, and a study by the University of Central Florida says it would cost $700,000 per mile.”
Although it’s small, one of the most vocal groups is Mothers Against Commonwealth Edison, a sort of spinoff from CAUSE that formed in the West Miltmore subdivision in an unincorporated area just outside Lake Villa.
“We’re not saying we don’t need electricity,” said Barbara Samuelson, an office manager and spokeswoman for MACE. “But we feel railroaded by Commonwealth Edison. We shouldn’t have to compromise our lifestyle. There are alternatives. Commonwealth Edison can give us this power safely. There are too many reports about negative effects of EMFs for them to tell us not to worry about it.
“We’re very serious. When you’re talking about your children, you do what you have to do. We got very tough with the school board to get them involved. We nagged and nagged and now they’re supporting this issue.”
Indeed, Lake Villa Community Consolidated School District 41 is one of 22 groups and individuals, including Rep. Philip Crane (R-Ill.) and Illinois Atty. Gen. Roland Burris, will oppose Edison’s plans at a May 17 Illinois Commerce Commission hearing on the Lake Villa/Antioch townships power line proposal.
Taking action
In the Wheaton/Warrenville area, a group called Friends of the Prairie Path forced similar action. Friends was organized about two years ago after residents learned that Commonwealth Edison planned to build an 85- to 110-foot-high transmission line with a new substation through the village of Warrenville near the library and day-care centers, the Herrick Lake forest preserve, the heavily used recreational Prairie Path and many homes.
Members of Friends of the Prairie Path include electrical engineers, lawyers and business managers-savvy people who know how to get things done-and consequently they have made quite an impact.
“We contacted all the elected officials, municipal, county and forest preserve,” said one of the founders, Bob Siebert of Warrenville, owner of a landscaping company who once worked in research for Northern Illinois Gas Co.
“At our initiation, the City of Wheaton instituted an ordinance restricting the amount of EMF that can be emitted at the perimeter of the substation, and Du Page County has established an ad hoc committee (to consider this matter).” Siebert’s group and a string of hired experts will oppose the line at an ICC hearing on April 27.
Challenges to utility projects are becoming a common avenue of protest. A survey by the Public Utility Commission of Texas last year found 201 challenges to utility projects in which electromagnetic fields were an issue.
Siebert says the main fear is cancer. “In some studies they haven’t said that EMF definitely causes cancer but it seems to weaken the immune system. There have been increases of cancer in the last 20 years. Many people in the field say it’s due to pollution, the environment. With more magnetic fields, what we’re doing is creating more situations where we’re breaking down our immune system.
“With a microwave, for instance, you can take measures to control your exposure to radiation. But if there’s transmission lines along the Prairie Path where people live and work, you can’t remove yourself, you have no control. But there are currently electrical engineering methods of solving this. You can control it by burying the lines. Commonwealth Edison has always said that would be very expensive.”
The specter of lawsuits
John Hogan, spokesman for Commonwealth Edison, said he doesn’t “want to generalize about citizens groups. They range in honesty and effectiveness like any other organization. I suppose they have a place in the fabric of society and we deal with them. When they’re honest and truthful, they can be very effective. We have troubles with them when they bend the truth.”
If removing, rerouting and burying electrical transmission lines would be expensive, the nation’s electric utilities now also face the specter of paying out millions as a result of negligence lawsuits similar to those filed against asbestos manufacturers nearly 20 years ago.
Michael Withey, a Seattle lawyer, has become the leader of nationwide group of law firms eager to turn EMF into a battleground. Withey made headlines several years ago when he pressured Boeing Co. into paying more than $500,000 to settle a suit filed by a former employee who contended that his leukemia was caused by exposure to electromagnetic radiation. That lawsuit was one of the first attempts to link cancer to electromagnetic fields.
Paul Brodeur, a New Yorker magazine staff writer who has written extensively on the EMF issue nationally and published the book “Currents of Death,” said that “without exception the utilities have denied there’s a problem, and the reason they’re denying there’s a problem is that they’re being directed by their lawyers not to make any admission that there’s a major public health hazard.”
For members of No Power Towers in central Kane County, organizing locally without going to the ICC seemed to be enough to get Commonwealth Edison to back off. James Hughes Sr. of Elburn and several other landowners mobilized in 1991 upon being informed that the utility wanted to put in 6 1/2 miles of transmission lines through their land to a new substation they were building in La Fox, a little town west of Geneva.
“I was aware of EMFs,” Hughes said. “I’m in the building business and we would never touch a piece of land that was within half a mile of a transmission line.”
Largely financed by Hughes, No Power Towers convened meetings that drew up to 400 people where guest experts explained the suspected EMF hazard, approached the Kane County Board and went through hearings with its health committee. A proposed ordinance declaring a two-year moratorium on transmission lines failed, but Commonwealth Edison has not gone through with the project.
Given the extent of the protests, challenges before utility commissions and evidence of negative effects, mother Michelle Oehlerking asks, “Why do we need all these people to testify over and over again? But we will. It’s worth it to try to fight when our children’s health is at stake.”
