Larry M. Jones

Everywhere you look these days, there are new communications towers being erected throughout the countryside. These include microwave relay towers, cell phone towers, radio and television broadcast towers, high-speed Internet towers and others I can only imagine.

I used to worry a lot more about all these towers than I do now. If you are motoring along in your sleek “flying machine,” and you drive into one of these steel towers, it can ruin your whole day. Leaving personal debris scattered across some farmer’s Coastal Bermuda field is not my idea of fun, especially if it’s because some yahoo forgot to change the burned out warning lights on the tower.

Our airwaves are literally flooded with electronic emissions — pulses of electromagnetic energy constantly bombard us, sometimes at intensity levels that are undoubtedly physically damaging to our health. I’ve heard all sorts of stories about strange things happening around these electronic emissions.

A buddy of mine in South Texas who was an avid quail hunter and trainer of bird dogs swore to me that an electronic shock collar used to discipline one of his dogs was inadvertently activated by a high voltage electrical transmission line. The dog took off like it had been “turpentined,” and he hasn’t been seen to this very day.

Yeah, right. The dog was also probably whelped from some extremely valuable championship line and was worth thousands of dollars.

There are countless stories about these stray voltages floating around in the air we breathe. I once heard of a person who continually complained of hearing music all day, every day. Supposedly, it was caused by a tooth filling that was “tuned” to the exact frequency of a nearby radio transmission tower and was acting much like a crystal radio receiver. Hey, that’s too crazy for even me to dream up.

While in the Navy, I knew of numerous accounts of fire control radar systems illuminating fluorescent lights in buildings that were miles away. This is especially prevalent in association with electronic countermeasure or jamming devices. These bad boys are often tightly focused and would fry bacon at a hundred paces. When you stop and think about it, an early brand of microwave ovens was called the “radar range.”

We have had to be extremely careful for years in order to avoid explosions or fires caused by static electricity and lightning strikes. Grain elevators and coal mines have on numerous occasions been blown to smithereens when a stray spark of static electricity ignited airborne flour or coal dust. Pipeline workers use non-ferrous shovels and picks to preclude sparks when working around fuel leaks.

A cousin of mine who works for Chevron Pipeline Division recently told me he had seen as high as 49 volts of electrical current on a pipeline in the vicinity of a high voltage transmission line. I’m certainly not knowledgeable in the field, but this would have to trigger a lot of safety concerns.

This seems particularly troubling since our political weasels in planning our Trans Texas Corridor from Hell have a dedicated right-of-way for — you guessed it — high voltage transmission lines and petrochemical pipelines, side by side.

Since the days of Ben Franklin we have been concerned about electrical fields, static electricity and the dangers and benefits of both. The 1800s were a heyday for the lightning rod salesman who promised an end to dreaded lightning strike fires to homes and barns. Many of these ornate systems can still be seen on older buildings.

Aircraft are likewise equipped with “static wicks” to dissipate any buildup of stray voltages. For anyone who has never seen St Elmo’s fire dancing like brilliant fluorescent cobwebs on an airplane’s windscreen or wing surfaces, they have missed a beautiful and fascinating phenomenon.

All the electromagnetic radiation in our environs has created numerous safety and health concerns. For years, all electronic devices were prohibited aboard aircraft because of possible interference with aircraft systems. In recent years it has been rumored that cell phones even cause brain cancer.

The next time you are in the doctor’s office, at a restaurant or at a public gathering and some village idiot feels they must entertain themselves by rudely yakking on the cell phone they probably can’t afford, think of it this way — if such cell phone usage does indeed cause brain cancer, perhaps it’s nature’s way of cleansing the gene pool.