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Mill Valley joins effort to constrain 5G proliferation
The city of Mill Valley has enacted an urgency ordinance to regulate "small cell" towers amid concerns that cellphone companies want to grow their 5G networks and install new equipment in Marin. "We do intend to do more work and studies to craft a permanent ordinance within the next year," Mill Valley Mayor Stephanie Moulton-Peters said Friday. "The urgency ordinance has standards to limit and prohibit the installations of devices in residential neighborhoods, but there is more that we can do."
The decision came on a unanimous vote by the City Council on Thursday, after residents from across Marin packed the council chambers as part of a campaign urging local officials to block cellphone companies from attempting to build 5G towers in the county. No proposals for 5G towers have been submitted to Mill Valley, staff said.
The issue is that 5G towers, which would allow for faster and higher-capacity video streaming and other transmissions, could exacerbate health symptoms already suspected as a result of exposure to electromagnetic fields, according to the EMF Safety Network, a group advocating to keep communities EMF-free. Those symptoms can include fatigue, headaches, sleep problems, anxiety, heart problems, learning and memory disorders, ringing in the ears and increased cancer risk, according to the EMF Safety Network website.
"What 5G does is it adds another cloud to what we refer to as 'electromagnetic smog' into an environment that is already pretty saturated," said Fairfax resident and activist Valeri Hood. "In Fairfax, what we're doing is asking our council to step up in the way councils have in the past, and just say no to 5G."
Also at HardOCP.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday September 12 2018, @12:39AM (1 child)
Your words evoke images of specificity, standards, quantifiable and definable things. Not so with their much more hand-wavy published pamphlet, What Is EMF? [emfsafetynetwork.org] (PDF warning), an excerpt from which appears below.
One might suspect that they're nutty as mixed nuts on a fruitcake, but not to worry, their website confidently asserts that:
There did not appear to be any reference to a particular study that supported these claims, footnoted or otherwise, so maybe their their word with a grain of salt. A big grain of salt. Their apparent attempt to smoothly, casually equate electromagnetic radiation with nuclear radiation is particularly troubling in the hand-wavy department. I wonder whether they even know that cell towers don't emit Iodine-131 as a natural part of their basic operation.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @01:22AM
Way off topic, but:
Our machines leak oil, often enough. Sometimes, that oil leaks above the electrical boxes. Now and then, you'll open an electrical cabinet, and find oil puddled at the bottom. Someone will ask, "How do we get oil in an ELECTRICAL CABINET?" And, my explanation for the past ten or twelve years has gone thus:
"They aren't maintenancing the generators like they used to. Instead of replacing failed bearings, they just lube hell out of them. There's excess oil all over the generators, and it has to go somewhere. So, it leaks into the power lines, and some of it ends up right here!"
You'd be surprised, first, at how many people take my explanation seriously.
You'd be even more surprised at how many people actually believe that explanation!!
Now, about that iodine-131 - where in hell do you expect it to go? :^)