FULL SIGNAL 52” SCRIPT:


TC In TC Out Dialogue
01:00:26:23 01:00:40:09 E. HANTZOPOLOUS: We’ve been here for just about 10 years and we chose this community because it’s diverse, its close to Manhattan, has a real family-friendly environment, and it just seemed like a good place to settle down.
01:00:50:00 01:00:56:15 I had just gotten a cell phone at the time mainly for work reasons because everyone told me, you need to have a cell phone, you need to have a cell phone.
01:01:04:23 01:01:09:09 So when the antennas did go up, or when I heard about it, I just kind of said, oh I get a signal, great!
01:01:16:18 01:01:43:01 NARRATION: We have embraced this technology with a tremendous fervor. Perhaps unlike any other technology.With over 3.5 billion cell phone subscribers on the face of the earth, that translates into billions upon billions of dollars in revenue.But there are some hidden charges as well.With tens of thousands of antennas built up to support the growing number of users, this is the price we’re all forced to pay.
01:01:44:06 01:02:20:13 B. LEVITT: If somebody lives near a cell tower, there is a constant radiofrequency signal coming out of that. It will boost higher when somebody is calling for that system to function, which is something that people who are using cell phones need to be made aware of because if somebody is making a cell phone call, then they are asking the person who is living near the infrastructure to take a spike in exposure when that system is online.However even when, in the middle of the night when nobody is making a cell phone call, there is still a constant small signal that is being given off from a tower.
00:02:40:04 00:02:55:09 NARRATION: Earth has a natural level of electromagnetic radiation which is produced by itself, the cosmos and the sun.But the signal from cellular communications is adding to this otherwise low background level of electromagnetic radiation.


01:02:39:10 01:03:01:05 B. LEVITT: Somebody did a study in Europe probably about 7 years ago, 6-7 years ago in which they measured the ambient backgrounds of European cities, and they found that the background levels had increased by a factor of over 3000% from what it had been over a decade ago. And that was in European cities.And it is thought that American cities are comparable to that now too.
01:03:02:00 01:03:27:24 O. JOHANSSON: The background levels that we are sitting in right now they are enormously high compared to normal background. I mean just for the 3rd generation mobile phones, the increase compared to normal background is one million billion times. So It’s an enormous increase, and we haven’t even bought the mobile phone, we’re just standing here in the radiation from cell towers.
01:03:28:12 01:03:43:13 B. LEVITT: People don’t understand very often that radiofrequency radiation is a form of energetic air pollution.They think that it just harmlessly goes through living systems and leaves all living molecules unaffected and unimpaired.That’s no necessarily the case.
01:03:45:07 01:04:03:19 L. SLESIN: There’s a wonderful study from Italy which measured ambient levels near a cell phone tower and you could actually see when all the Italians went off and had lunch, you know there was a dip in the ambient levels, and then after lunch and everybody has their little siesta it goes back up.I mean you can see the human influence.
01:04:29:09 01:04:42:12 D. CARPENTER: The problem is we place antennas in the center of residential areas, we place them on schools, we place them in busy downtown settings where hundreds and thousands of people are exposed. You can’t avoid it.


01:04:43:02 01:05:16:00 L. SALFORD: You are basically not safe anywhere. And soon there is no control population left because everybody is reached by the waves.This is the world’s largest biological experiment ever.We really haven’t given the full observation to the possible risks.
01:05:35:01 01:05:58:24 B. LEVITT: There are about 13 studies that have found DNA breaks, both double and single strand DNA breaks with cell phone frequencies.Now single-strand DNA breaks are known to repair themselves, a lot of things break DNA, air pollution breaks DNA, any number of things will.But double-strand DNA breaks are thought not to repair themselves and that can lead to genetic mutations.
01:06:33:09 01:07:32:14 E. HANTZOPOLOUS: People don’t realize what these antennas mean. They don’t understand how they function, they don’t understand how their cell phone really functions, so I was naïve in that way.Never even thought about what it meant.When I first became involved with this issue I had two children, and now I have 3, and of course they were the main reason I think why I became so involved and so concerned about what was going on because obviously children are the most vulnerable in our society. I felt like I needed to educate myself and as I started to research more and more, I saw that this was actually a very controversial subject and that the WHO had identified radiofrequency radiation as a potential human carcinogen.And I said well that can’t be good. That just can’t be good.So even if right now the studies are inconclusive, there is enough evidence here to say we should be thinking about this a little bit more deeply than we are now.


01:07:33:07 01:07:44:10 B. LEVITT: A lot of people presume that if something is in our presence that someone somewhere determined that it was safe. People are making presumptions of safety that really shouldn’t be made.
01:07:44:14 01:08:26:14 D. CARPENTER: There are standards for non-ionizing radiation protection.They are set on the basis of the assumption that there is no adverse health effect to humans unless the radiation is sufficient to cause tissue heating.In other words it’s acting like a microwave oven, and you don’t want to bake your brain as you would a potato in your microwave oven. The assumptions behind the standards that exist are simply wrong. They’re not set by health professionals they’re set by physicists and engineer-types and they are ignoring the evidence for human health.
01:08:26:16 01:08:38:24 L SLESIN: You should know who wrote the standards, which is the Motorolas, and Nokias of the world, the military who have their own interest in all of this.They have no interest in lowering the standard; they want to keep it as high as they can.
01:08:49:07 01:09:28:07 D CARPENTER: As we get more information we find that our standards are too lax. And not having a standard that is protective of human health provides no motivation for the cell phone companies to find ways of allowing us to use wireless communication, but to use it safely. In many cases we find that the technical people can find ways of utilizing the technology with less exposure if they have a motivation to do so.
01:09:29:02 01:09:34:09 NARRATION: But with money not health being the prime motivator, antennas continue to go up.


01:09:39:15 01:10:26:19 S. TZUKERNIK: The first set was put up in 1999. It was actually put up on a Sabbath.The entire building are Sabbath-observant Jews and no one could really protest or do anything about that at the time.And then there were other sets put up through the years.We have 3 possibly 4 companies on the roof of our building.I know that at one point there were 27, but I think there have been another 3 towers added by a different company in the last 2 years.We feel very powerless in terms of what’s being done. The money that’s being earned at our expense.
01:10:34:18 01:11:09:05 S. SCOTT: We bought this place 2 years ago, and spent a year renovating it, and then when we moved in, within a couple of weeks I started getting terrible headaches.And we thought maybe it had been mis-wired.So it took us a while to bring in an environmental engineer from the West Coast.So he came and spent 3 days here doing all sorts of research, and he came back and said that it’s wired perfectly, but the problem is the cell antennas outside your window and off the roof decks.
01:11:10:04 01:11:26:00 M. SCOTT: In fact when he spend the night here, he went inside a tent to get through the night an electromagnetic wave-reflecting tent.And of course we sleep under tents now.
01:11:33:15 01:11:56:07 S. SCOTT: You know what’s funny is since we’ve been complaining and sending them letters that 2 of the antennas they seem to have pointed in a different direction.But there’s 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 right here on these 2 sides, then on the north and west side there’s I don’t know how many more, 10 more.


01:12:06:00 01:12:35:03 B. LEVITT: This presumption that we can just continue to put massive amounts of wireless radiation into the ambient environment, whether it’s from a cell phone, a cell tower, a WiFi system, endless amounts of broadcast radiation, endless amounts of satellite radiation, all manner of military applications, the presumption that we can just continue to dump this into the environment like that with no consequence to us or to other species really needs to be rethought, because it simply is not the case.
01:12:35:18 01:12:58:18 D. CARPENTER: There is getting to be a whole body of literature that is demonstrating changes in behavior, changes in the ability to learn and remember.Some studies are showing that people that spend a long time on the cell phone aren’t as alert and bright after they get off the cell phone as they were before.
01:13:10:02 01:13:23:14 O. JOHANSSON: there has been a clear-cut deterioration, especially since 1997, since then the second-generation mobile phones, the GSM system was introduced, and you see a very clear-cut deterioration of the public health.
01:13:24:02 01:14:09:19 NARRATION: Most of us have lived with cell phones or near cell phone towers for years without feeling any effects.But one group in particular does.One day Rigmor a school teacher in Stockholm, Sweden discovered that she was sensitive to electrical devices.After visiting doctors and being sent to psychologists and getting no answers, an engineer friend of hers helped her with the diagnosis.Rigmor was electro-hypersensitive.After doing some research of her own on electro-hypersensitivity, she discovered that she had to electro-sanitize her home.Rigmor had to change the wiring add cages to her electrical devices, and nets to her windows.The electro-sanitization worked, at least for a while.


01:14:11:15 01:14:38:10 R. GRANDLUND-LIND: 1995 I wasn’t electro-hypersensitive anymore. But then I got ill again when the mobile phone came, 1997.Just like other allergies, some people can’t stand one flower and another can’t stand another flower, and among electro hypersensitive people, we are allergic to different frequencies.
01:14:39:12 01:15:53:05 O. JOHANSSON: We did a double blind exposure test with people with electro-hypersensitivity, and that was in 1994 already, and that was the very first study using mobile phones.And one of these people in this study was able to 100% of the time pick out correctly the presence or not of such a mobile phone.When we talk about the people with the functional impairment electro-hypersensitivity, we really talk about anyone. There doesn’t seem to be any specific profile. There have been calculations, country by country, and it boils down to somewhere between 2-6 percent of the general population.Just in a country like the United States it would be in the order of 10-15 million people would be electro-hypersensitive.Here in Sweden, for instance, we talk about approximately 250,000 people with electro-hypersensitivity out of a population of 9 million. And out of these 250,000, I would say maybe 500 have real big problems, and some of them even live out in the woods and things like this.And that is, of course, a dramatic change of your life.
01:15:53:11 01:16:12:12 R. GRANDLUND-LIND: After the mobile phone came, and wireless internet, you’re exposed all the time, so the only place that is safe if you have a field-reduced home is to stay at home and that is what I do.We have a lot of friends coming here, I can’t visit friends.


01:16:17:00 01:17:18:24 EHS VOICES FROM BLACK ON WHITE: After being close to a cellular phone for 10-15 minutes, my body turns red on the side facing the cellular phone.If I am in the vicinity of someone talking on a cell phone, I come down with influenza-like symptoms, with pain throughout my body, a feeling of fever without actually having a fever, headaches and a sore throat.The burning feels as though it goes through my entire body, the pain is unbearable. If I can I have to move away.When I ride the bus or subway during rush hour, there are often so many people talking on phones at the same time that it is impossible to maintain an adequate distance from them. Even transmitters around the city are a problem. Some bus stops are located so close to transmitters that I can’t wait there. It’s more difficult with microwaves, I can’t turn them off and they penetrate everything. The antennas along the roads make it so that I can’t travel anywhere. I get convulsions and an extreme burning sensation on my face. I also get black spots before my eyes. Cellular phones which so many people use while walking around also affect me.
01:17:22:23 01:17:45:01 B. LEVITT: When you have people complaining all over the world with the same kinds of reactions, what you need to do is throw out the theory that says this can’t be happening, and restructure a model and take a look at the fact that maybe not everybody is crazy.Maybe the people that are reporting adverse effects are reporting legitimate physical reactions.
01:17:45:02 01:17:56:21 R. GRANDLUND-LIND: I get very ill if someone has forgotten to turn off their mobile phone when they visit me. After a couple of hours I feel ill, after 4 hours I can’t speak anymore.
01:17:57:13 01:18:11:15 B. LEVITT: What we need to do is listen to the people that are saying things like my health is crashing I can’t live here anymore. We need to listen to them and believe them because these are our canaries in a coalmine at the moment.
01:18:26:21 01:18:44:08 O. JOHANSSON: People with electro-hypersensitivity seem to react to this toxic environmental exposure that you and I, we do not react to this, and maybe we are the losers because we will have a risk of getting long-term effects like neurological diseases, cancer and whatever.
01:18:44:20 01:19:08:21 R. GRANDLUND-LIND: It’s very difficult to explain to those who don’t believe in us, but that’s a fact that also the scientists that get money to do research on us, and that’s not very often they get anything, they could show that on cells. Cells can’t imagine things, they don’t know about psychology.
01:19:09:12 01:20:00:18 L SALFORD: I’m a neurosurgeon, and I’m dealing with people of course every day, but in part of my research, I’ve been studying rats when it comes to what happens to the rats when they are exposed to radiation from mobile phones, basically, but also then, you can translate the information you collect from rats being exposed to the mobile phones into a knowledge about what happens at a longer distance. And we have shown that animals that have been exposed for 2 hours to the radiofrequency of a mobile phone, both at 28 days afterwards, and 50 days afterwards, there are damaged nerve cells in up to 2 percent of the tissue, both in the region where we keep our memory function, and also in the layer of the brain with which we think. This makes me feel that this is something we have to be careful about.


01:20:01:03 01:20:54:10 O. JOHANSSON: You can clearly see that from a number of studies that has used low levels mimicking what you get right now while we do this interview from the cell towers, and you see there are a lot of dramatic effects on the biological systems. We talk about 24/7 around the clock exposure, wherever you are, and your whole body. You never get away from it. And it seems from our studies that maybe your immune system can cope with it for a time, but it will deteriorate and then the irradiation will definitely damage cells at a deeper level and the question is what will then happen? And for us the big question marks are effects for instance on the immune system, on the DNA, on short-term memory, concentration capacity, sleep quality, fertility etc.
01:20:55:06 01:21:12:20 S. TZUKERNIK: People have complained of dizziness, inability to concentrate, disruption of menstrual cycles. Two women who I know who are struggling very much in terms of getting pregnant, and the first one definitely noticed a change after the towers had been up for a while.
01:21:12:22 01:21:32:24 O. JOHANSSON: And the question is of course as you say, we don’t see people falling dead in the street, but for instance here in Sweden, more than 1/3 of the people report heavy problems with their nighttime sleep. And sleep is one of these subjective areas which definitely various forms of electromagnetic fields will have an impact on.
01:21:33:11 01:22:11:14 D. CARPENTER: We vary in our own genetic susceptibility to exposure to environmental factors. One person could smoke two packs of cigarettes for 20 years and not get lung cancer. Another person could smoke 5 cigarettes a week and develop lung cancer because of the tobacco. So it isn’t just a matter of exposure, it’s a matter of individual sensitivity. But on a population-basis, the evidence we have at present suggests that the aggregate risk to the population increases as the intensity and the duration of exposure become greater.


01:22:15:16 01:22:48:08 S. TZUKERNIK: In our building there have been numerous deaths from cancer. You know it’s difficult to say that this is definitely a result of the towers, but definitely there is a cluster of deaths in this apartment building since the 1990s that are the cause of cancer. You know I think things happen incrementally. It’s not all at once like it went up and boom you feel something. But then as time goes by it’s noticeable.
01:23:17:21 01:23:45:01 D CARPENTER: We have a massive human experiment of people that have been exposed to something that probably is going to result in increased risk of these cancers, and we won’t know for another 5-10 years how serious this is. In my judgment, the evidence right now is sufficient to say, that we should be very cautious and from a public health perspective this is a very serious issue.
01:24:16:06 01:24:58:04 B. LEVITT: We haven’t had a long enough latency period for a civilian-based cell system. Many of the latency periods for brain tumors for instance or cancers in general, have a latency period of at least 10 years. And the technology has only been around for the last 10-15 years at the most. We are seeing increases in brain tumors, we’re seeing increases in Alzheimer’s, we’re seeing increases in all the neurotransmitter diseases ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Parkinson’s, these are all disease systems that are known to be associated with low level energy exposures.


01:24:58:09 01:25:44:04 L. SLESIN: When I hear the American Cancer Society talk about the fact that for less than 10 years we have no problem that’s kind of like missing the big picture. If you look at smoking which they should know all about, you look after 10 years among smokers; you do not see a statistical significant increase in lung cancer. Same with asbestos, no doubt asbestos is a horrible carcinogen, I mean, it killed many, many hundreds of thousands people, yet if you look at people exposed to asbestos after ten years they do not also have a statistically significant increase in mesothelioma. I mean you have to go out 15-20 years before we start to see the real impact.
01:25:46:02 01:26:30:15 D. CARPENTER: The particular concern is the unique vulnerability of children, and the more research that comes out from various studies, particularly the Scandinavian studies show that children that began to use cell phones before the age of 20, are about 5 times more likely to go on to develop brain cancer, than if they use them after the age of 30. And people that began to use cell phones between the ages of 20 and 30 are more vulnerable to develop brain cancer than those that use them after 30.There is no reason for a child to be on the phone all the time. There are reasons they shouldn’t be, independent of the health concerns, but it is dangerous for children, more dangerous than for adults.
01:26:31:24 01:26:49:19 L. SALFORD: It’s not only the people who put it towards their head who have a penetration of the electromagnetic field its also those who go next to his father, the father keeps the mobile phone in his pocket, the son walks away, some 8 inches away, his brain is penetrated too by the fields from the mobile phone.
01:26:50:02 01:27:00:14 O. JOHANSSON: You would only need like a one-minute exposure of a child to change for more than one hour the electrical activity of the brain and at very low exposure levels.


01:27:00:17 01:27:22:02 B. LEVITT: I think it’s a very dangerous thing that we’re doing now in so many young people in particular using cell phones as their primary form of communication, and abandoning their landline connections.The communications industries, they want the world to go wireless because its much cheaper for them to do that. That’s really where they are trying to force the technology to go.
01:27:22:11 01:27:40:14 L. SALFORD: if you start at a very young age, you speak everyday several hours, it might be so that already in the middle age you have extorted your reserve capacities of your brain so that auto-immune diseases and neurodegenerative diseases might debut earlier than they should.
01:27:40:17 01:27:52:01 B. LEVITT: And now for the first time in human history brain tumors are the number one cancer killer of children under the age of 18. For the first time in human history that should tell us something.
01:27:52:09 01:28:19:05 D. CARPENTER: The diseases of concern Leukemia, brain tumors, parotid gland tumors, these are serious life threatening diseases and if they increase in the population particularly if they increase from childhood exposure or young adult exposure these are very debilitating they are going to increase years of life loss in young people not just in elderly.
01:28:21:08 01:28:28:18 NARRATION: but the industry has it’s own response to concerns about cell towers going up, just hide them
01:28:29:05 01:29:25:23 C. SEELBACH: This steeple that has inside it a number of cell sites is a replica of the steeple we had built 53 years ago on the church which is very beneficial for our town because they don’t like to see unattractive cell sites around and no one even knows its here in this one so that’s a big advantage. In this area of town which is a major area of town we had dead zones by all the carriers it was horrible. And one of the enterprising lawyers from one of the companies stopped by here and asked us if we would be interested in having cell sites in our steeple and we of course said yes and here we are.


01:29:27:08 01:30:41:20 REV. DR. J. BOSMAN: It was the perfect opportunity for us to provide since this is the highest location the signals from here in service to the community. So for us it sort of ties in with that idea of bringing service but at some point the conversation went to the symbolic significance of the church being in the middle of a dead zone and providing sort of life or service where there was none and we sort of mined that at some point for that sort of metaphorical value. Yes there is some misconception about radiation and those kinds of things but on the whole we did not have that high sort of response from the community regarding that.
01:30:42:02 01:31:00:22 C. SEELBACH: There were some concerns but mostly unfounded and we had experts there who knew about the rumors of radiation or things like that, and I think they dispelled both us who live 130 feet from the top of this as well as others on the lack of any danger.
01:31:01:07 01:31:11:22 B. LEVITT: If they’ve defined it, they’ve framed it and they’ve interpreted it and set the standards accordingly, how likely are they to say oh well we need a redo on this one.
01:31:12:09 01:31:27:04 L. SLESIN: This is a very serious issue of which we don’t have the answers and we are not doing anything about it, not even studying it. In the United States today there is not one study going on. ZERO.
01:31:27:05 01:31:44:07 O. JOHANSSON: Its impossible to get any funding which is so odd and I don’t have any clear-cut answer. You have to ask politicians, funding organizations, the industry, and so on, why they don’t want scientists like myself to really prove it’s safe because they say it’s safe, but it’s not safe to study it.
01:31:44:07 01:32:15:04 L. SLESIN: The cell phone industry betrayed the American public, I mean if you go back to the history and believe me I lived through the history. In 1993 they made a commitment to the American public to spend 25 million dollars to do the research to find out whether they was any problem. They never did it. It was a scam. And it took 6 or 7 years for the scam to work itself through and by the year 2000 when there were supposed to be all these results they went to the cupboard, and the cupboard was bare.


01:32:15:09 01:32:31:15 O. JOHANSSON: If you read your science history unfortunately that has been the case in many situations, many questions, and many countries, that the industry has put their hands into these issues. The most sort of famous question is, of course, the tobacco scandal.
01:32:31:24 01:32:53:13 B. LEVITT: The US Environmental Protection Agency had the best research laboratory on earth. It was well funded, had top-notch scientists, very curious, very competent people. That agency was almost completely defunded just about the time the telecommunications act was being enacted in America.
01:33:15:17 01:33:28:20 D. CARPENTER: We have the outrageous situation where our US congress passed a law several years ago that prohibits communities from objecting to the placement of the cell phone tower on the basis of concerns for health.
01:33:29:03 01:34:27:03 W. SEYMOUR, JR, ESQ: It was 1996 when the congress of the United States responding to industry requests, set up a plan to have a nation wide cell transmission system. The Congress assigned to the to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the responsibility for licensing telecom companies and for trying keep obstacles out of the way, and so Congress passed the provision that preempts all state and local government and said that if the FCC set up safety regulations that would govern and nobody else could interfere with it, that was a very sensible thing at the time because it really started the race to get the telecom system operating nation wide. The problem is of course it became rigid and began to have adverse consequences
01:34:26:24 01:34:46:04 G. SEYMOUR: The telecom companies essentially bought and paid Congress for the votes to pass this act which they believed had absolute preemption over local zoning and planning regulations. Taking local control over the placement of towers out of the hands of the people who were going to live right next to them.
01:34:46:21 01:34:54:05 NARRATION: but people are slowly starting to fight a process that strips them of control over their environment.
01:34:54:11 01:35:43:18 L. GORDON: We were supposed to have a cell antenna put on our rooftop by T-mobile. In 2004 they signed a contract with he coop board president to install 6 antennas and a cell tower, 16 thousand pounds on our rooftop, and a year later when they were about to install it some of our tenants, the shareholders like me found out this was going to happen, we researched the dangers of them and decided not to have it done, and we got a temporary restraining order. We took T-mobile to court and we went through a lot of court dates, we went through lots of affidavits signed by people in the building, we got people in the neighborhood to sign 400 petitions. Did a lot of research, a lot of mobilizing, press conferences, newspaper articles. I created a coalition of neighborhood groups and legislatures in Albany and the city council were working on this whole issue to begin to work together to call attention to the whole subject
01:35:43:20 01:36:00:01 S SCOTT: We have been in touch with lawyers who may think we have a precedent-setting case because of the measurements in our apartment, but again the question is where’s the proof. Do you have to die of cancer first?
01:36:21:24 01:36:48:04 P. VALLONE JR: Well we started this fight here in New York city 5-6 years ago and that was when people didn’t know what these little towers were. Now they are popping up next to everybody’s bedroom window, completely unregulated less regulated here in New York City than probably anywhere in the world. I got a bill passed which is the first time had the city keep track of them. Other bills I’ve been trying to get passed but I’ve been stymied by the multi billion-dollar industry and by the fact that the federal government coddles these phone carriers.


01:36:48:19 01:37:32:11 G. SEYMOUR: There is a lot of money involved for the Government in licensing these microwave spectra. There is a lot of money for the telecommunications companies who everyday receive your payment for your cell phone, and that is ongoing revenues. The telecom companies have to get their foot in the door in a small community to put up a cell tower. The Lure to get the small community to put up that cell tower is an ongoing revenue from a contract for leasing that space. Two-three thousand dollars 5 thousand dollars, it's not out of the question to get that every month. What town or what church, what person with property isn’t going to take up that offer.
S SCOTT: I’ve counted more than 14 towers or antennas over on the building. I think they get something like 25 thousand dollars a tower a year, so you think, you know, it’s a huge, huge profit making situation for them.
01:37:32:21 01:37:50:04 P. VALLONE JR: The landlords are making thousands dollar a month on this, the companies are making billions of dollars on this. So there is a lot of money, and the lobbyists are getting paid lots of money to donate to elected officials’ campaigns. They can put them anywhere and the reason they put them there is because they get a better deal from the landlord.


01:37:50:21 01:38:28:01 E. HANTZOPOLOUS: There needs to be opportunity for more stakeholders to be involved in actually looking at where are we putting these. Are there too many. How do we get the telecommunications companies to work together? I know of course they are all competing against one another, they are all out to make their profits but how can we force a more comprehensive policy that’s really going to put the public’s interest not just the interest of using a cell phone. But really looking at what the environmental impact is of all these antennas going up. You can see I’ve got them in the back, I’ve got them in the front, they’re down the street, I mean they’re everywhere and I don’t think people even realize how widespread they really are.
01:38:30:14 01:38:45:12 G. SEYMOUR: These signals are everywhere and their able to reach us even in the homes we believe are sacred and safe. We have absolute protection to be safe in our own homes. Under the Telecom Act and under the failure to set these safety standards we are not safe.
01:38:45:13 01:39:27:03 P. VALLONE JR: Like asbestos like lead paint, no one knew about it early. All we’re looking for is to regulate these until we know for sure that they’re not harmful, I have simple bills that I need passed. Community notice, co-location, have the cell companies come in and prove they really need it in this spot and they’re not just putting it there to prevent a competitor from putting it there.Have a cell company come and show us why they can’t put this a commercial building on an industrial building, not next somebody’s bedroom window. I have been fighting this for five years now, from peoples bedrooms.I’ve been fighting it cell towers been popping up across the street from peoples bedroom windows. People have moved that I know, but you know, you move and you never know that they’re not going to put another one up across the street from your new house, there is nothing you can do about it.
01:39:27:12 01:39:40:10 E. HANTZOPOLOUS: The Solution is not people packing up and moving because you really can’t escape these antennas or these towers. You just can’t escape them, they’re everywhere.So the solution is really having some kind of public policy on the books that’s looking to protect the public.
01:39:42:05 01:40:01:13 P. VALLONE JR: Cell companies are having landlords sign 20, 30 year leases and they won’t even let the landlord out. Many landlords I have spoken to. They say oh I would never have done that had I known about the potential risk. They can’t get out of contract now because they, it’s a completely one sided contract, they don’t even use attorneys the landlords because there is so much money per month that they get and now they’re stuck in this contract.
01:40:02:03 01:40:29:21 L. GORDON: We went to court to get a temporary restraining order and we did that about three times and the second judge said to them that they had to disclose a whole list of things to her about what they did not give information accurately to us about.They got so concerned about that, that they tried to jump it to appeals court, the appeals court jumped it back to her. and at that point it got stale matted because T-mobile did not want to do anything further about it.So we still had the case in court, we had a suit against them, and they had a lawsuit against us for breaking the contract. And our suit against them was for misrepresenting the size of the antenna.
01:40:30:24 01:40:58:22 NARRATION: Dina Jaeger, a mother of 2 children, heard news of a plan by Verizon to install a 150 cell tower on a firehouse less than 1200 feet away from her home. Concerned over her family’s health and safety, but knowing should could not raise that issue in court, Dina Jaeger instead challenged the placement of the antenna based on the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the fact that rare and endangered species of birds frequent her property.


01:40:59:13 01:41:30:17 G. SEYMOUR: Its ironic isn’t it, that we have to raise the issue of the safety of birds, but I’ve often said, birds don’t have lobbyists, and it may have left the very loophole it requires to get us to a higher court to hear this issue.We don’t believe that we are preempted to raise the issue of human health when it comes to the failure of the FCC to set those none thermal effect standards, and that’s the point that we raise time after time in these cases in federal court.
01:41:31:02 01:41:40:08 NARRATION: And while fighting the cellular industry is a difficult task, after 3 years of court battles, this one co-op building in Brooklyn showed that it isn’t impossible.
01:41:40:08 01:41:47:06 L. GORDON: We basically beat T-mobile and they decided to go away and we got them to sign off on it they’re not coming back, there in no cost to our building.
01:41:47:19 01:42:01:11 NARRATION: People in the United States are not the only ones trying to fight for the regulation of antenna sites. In cities towns and villages across the globe people are learning about the health impacts and protesting against the towers.
01:42:02:20 01:42:16:08 O. JOHANSSON: September 4 2008, the European parliament voted strongly in favor to have a general overhaul of these exposure limits, and they said they were actually obsolete, they need to be stronger reduced.
01:42:17:12 01:42:32:14 D. CARPENTER: It’s a global problem. It perhaps is even a greater problem in some developing countries because many developing countries don’t have landlines. Its just too expensive and difficult in the era of easy use cell phones.
01:42:33:23 01:42:52:10 NARRATION: In the Arab village of Issifya in Northern Israel, frustrations grew over the large number of antennas in the village and the lack of government response to their requests to take them down. But the situation changed on March 14, 2000 when telecom engineers arrived in the village.


01:42:52:23 01:43:19:05 S. ABU RUKUN: In this area, some of the young men watched the technicians, they found the technicians trying to unload equipment to strengthen the transmission station that was on top of that house, thousands of residents of the village gathered here, people were upset by this situation and they decided that if the law doesn’t support us, we will take down the antennas ourselves.
01:43:19:23 01:43:36:10 DR. Z. SHALITA: In Issifya, Where they put antennas, after about 6-7 years, there started to get cancer cases, near the antennas, many cases just where the antennas were.
01:43:37:08 01:45:29:20 S. AZZAM: Three and a half years ago, I had cancer, it was very difficult for me, when I know it because, when I was in the office of the doctor, that said to me I had cancer, my daughter, the eldest one was with me,it was very difficult for me as a mother, to look to my daughter’s eyes and see her crying for me.There was another difficult moment for me after I knew that I had this disease , the moment that I had to tell my mother and my father, that they have another child was affected by cancer, and it was scary till death, how can I look in my mother’s eyes and tell her that your daughter has cancer. My mother was crying all the time, Four surgeries, and three and a half months of chemotherapy, and after that radiation, the whole treatment. My youngest child was three years old only, it was difficult for me, because everything was going on my mind, that I am going to die, and leave him alone to struggle without a mother.
01:45:32:00 01:46:14:05 S. ABU RUKUN: There was an increase in the number of cancer cases in Issifya after 1995, other illnesses increased, and the number of deaths also increased, and people became too afraid to go to the doctor’s office and have blood tests done, for fear the doctor might diagnose them with cancer. There was an unusually high number of deaths that occurred in November 1999, 15 people died of cancer in one month including my brother.


01:46:16:16 01:46:37:19 DR. Z. SHALITA: We took the places of the antennas, and put them on a map, and we took all the cases of cancer, in the last seven years , and put them also on a map, and we got a thrilling picture of cases of cancer near the antennas, and when you see, that cancer cases, are just near the antennas, you can see the association
01:46:39:07 01:46:44:09 NARRATION: Nowadays Suleiman, a retired Israeli army Colonel is on a new mission: to locate hidden antennas in the village.
01:46:45:11 01:47:25:02 S. ABU RUKUN: We have detected radiation in the area using our equipment, it starts in this area here, and goes in the direction of the water tower, when we get just below the house by the water tower the signal disappears, and then when we move westwards we detect the signal on our equipment again. The closer we get to the house the higher the radiation level, this indicates that this house has radiation there is source of radiation which is the antenna,
01:47:25:06 01:47:33:16 NARRATION: The Druze, Christian and Muslim leaders of he village put forth a joint statement proclaiming it sacrilegious to install cell phone antennas.
01:47:34:00 01:48:32:18 S. ABU RUKUN: It was very effective, especially with people we didn’t know had antennas, who we didn’t even know had antennas.Two months ago we were able to remove an antenna an antenna before it was operational, that they were going to install between this village and the neighboring one, we heard about it and went to the house and when we got there and saw where they were planning on installing the equipment, it was right outside his children’s bedrooms. Perhaps he didn’t consider the fact that his children could become ill, but I am sure he was greedily thinking of the $1500-$2000 they were going to pay.And the cell companies are taking advantage of the dire economic situation we are in to advance their own goals, And our village is now free of antennas, and here we are, LIVING! Antennas are not a necessity of life they are not like milk for babies, and many say, “we are comfortable this way, we don’t want antennas.”
01:48:36:00 01:49:12:01 L. SLESIN: One of the many many ironies in all this is if people agree not to use their phone, they wouldn’t need a tower,so it would be quite easy to have a region without a tower by just making an agreement “listen if you come live here your not going to be able to use your cell phone, your going to have to use an old fashioned land line. You know end of story, I mean its not an impossible thing, its just a choice, people love the phones, hate the towers, they don’t want to live without the cell phone, but they don’t want the tower,but if they don’t use their phones, they don’t need the towers, its really that simple.
01:49:12:09 01:49:42:17 B. LEVITT: Its not going to be helpful, if we think that all modern technology is bad for us, I mean who wants to do that, I mean I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no radio and no TV and no electricity, but it’s a question of bringing more intelligence to the purchasing decisions that we make, how long we use certain things, the wiring decisions we make, and as societies to bring awareness of the infrastructure decisions that need to be made. There are much safer infrastructures than what we are doing now.
01:49:42:23 01:50:20:03 E. HANTZOPOLOUS: I did get rid of my cell phone, I don’t think that people need to get rid of their cell phones, that’s not what I’m suggesting, what concerns me is where these are how they are in close proximity to where people live, are the different carriers planning with each other in terms of where they are going to go, none of that is really happening, and there is no coordination like I said, there is no policy, there is no public policy on this issue, the industry has been able to have free reign and so, yes people while need their cell phone service, that’s absolutely true, they don’t need to go outside someone’s window, they don’t need to go across a school, they don’t need to go on places like that where’re you really potentially putting the public at risk.


01:50:20:16 01:51:08:07 D. CARPENTER: In my judgment we are sitting on a ticking bomb, and were not doing what we should do to advise people on ways that they can reduce their exposure, to tell them that they should reduce their exposure, that they should just be aware of this threat you know I sincerely hope that its not as bad as I think it is, but my job as a public health official is to do what I can to prevent disease, not wait till people develop their brain tumor, and find ways of treating it. And I think that the evidence at present calls for an active urgent message to the public to the politicians to the companies, that we must find ways of reducing exposure to radio frequency fields.
01:51:08:12 01:51:24:08 L. SALFORD: Everybody needs their mobile phones so much, its such a beloved thing, its so useful, I used to say it saved so many peoples lives, in earthquakes and crimes or where ever, so it saved so many lives, and so far we don’t know how many lives were taken.

 

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