By: Kurt Gutknecht
Like the vast majority of Americans, I thought it was a rare phenomenon, an unfortunate consequence of “bad wiring” or something. I was woefully mistaken.
As the editor of an agricultural magazine in Wisconsin, I had occasionally interviewed farm families and dutifully recorded their complaints about stray voltage without thinking too much about the topic.
Some of their complaints seemed unusual. Some families said electrical conditions had driven them out of their homes. They blamed stray voltage for depression, heart attacks and numerous other ailments. Their lives had been ruined. Their cows and other livestock had died in droves, after suffering from a harrowing cluster of ailments – birth defects, misshapen limbs, unusual metabolic disorders.
My response wasn’t too different from that of most Americans. I heard these farmers but I wasn’t really listening.
In 1999, I decided to determine why farmers’ complaints about stray voltage had persisted for almost three decades. Farmers were bitter and angry, even as university researchers, government agencies and the utilities treated the matter as an unfortunate anomaly. There was a problem, the experts said, but it was a minor one – and probably the result of the farmers’ sloppy wiring.
I learned otherwise. The problems noted by farmers are but one manifestation (albeit one of the most visible) of a much, much larger problem created by an outdated and dangerous system of distributing electricity. Electrical pollution is probably making millions of people sick. It’s killing many of them, just like it has killed livestock and ruined farmers.
Electricity is a ubiquitous component of contemporary society but most of us know extraordinarily little about it. I was no different and spent several months grasping the essential principles. I then spent several years confirming what farmers have been saying for years.
I had several advantages, including time to figure out what was really going on and unlimited access to an industrial electrician, a professor of electrical engineering and other independent experts who employed sophisticated instruments to measure electrical pollution.
In every case, where levels of electrical pollution were high, people and livestock were sick, often seriously so. And in every case, an extremely sophisticated and expensive system was in place to denigrate their claims, ridicule those who made them – and guarantee that the problem would never be examined by independent, trained experts.
The indiscriminant and deliberate release of massive amounts electricity into the environment is a problem of staggering dimensions.
Although the subject is usually larded with technical jargon that makes it difficult for a layperson to understand, the fundamental principles of the major sources of the electrical pollution are relatively simple to understand.
For example, nearly everyone knows that electricity has to complete a circuit, which means every electron that leaves a substation has to return to a substation.
Most people assume electricity returns on a wire. It often doesn’t. The return (neutral) wires are often smaller than the wires that deliver electricity to us. This means that “excess” return current routinely travels down ground wires into the earth, where it makes its way back to substations – and travels through everything in its path, including cows and humans.
As the demand for electricity has increased, more and more current has been released into the environment. That’s bad enough. It gets much, much worse. The advent of computers, variable speed motors and a variety of other types of equipment, including many that conserve energy, created what’s often called “dirty electricity.” This equipment distorts the “clean” current, creating resulting in electricity that’s at much higher frequencies.
The higher the frequency, the lower the capacity of wires, which means even more return electricity spills into the environment. And the higher the frequency, the more harmful its biological effects.
The electrical distribution system is analogous to a water system. Clean water arrives via small pipes under relatively high pressure. Contaminated water leaves via larger pipes under much lower pressure.
With the electrical distribution system (a system that even Thomas Edison characterized as unsafe), the dirty electricity leaves via wires that are often smaller than the wires that deliver it. This contaminated electricity is allowed to flood into the environment, with no monitoring or limits. It also pollutes the same wires that deliver clean electricity.
Dirty electricity is a major problem in industrial settings because it can harm motors and electronic equipment. Industries spend billions of dollars annually correcting the problem –which is known as improving power quality – in factories. Nothing is done about dirty electricity in other settings. Nothing is done to protect humans.
It’s no coincidence that the problems associated with so-called stray voltage surfaced when levels of dirty electricity began to increase.
Livestock succumb sooner than humans because they stand for long periods on wet, conductive surfaces. Nonetheless, humans also suffer, as recorded in the testimony of farm families before commissions charged with determining an “acceptable” level of stray voltage. Families repeatedly begged – unsuccessfully -- for an investigation of the health effects of stray voltage. They had a unique perspective on the problem since they noticed they became sick when their cows did.
On the face of it, this sounds preposterous: Wouldn’t we notice all this electricity? Usually not, because electricity dumped into the environment is at an extremely low voltage. Electricity is the perfect pollutant. It’s odorless, invisible and difficult to detect without expensive equipment. It can also be easily manipulated before an investigation. It leaves no trace.
And it isn’t dispersed uniformly but takes the path of least resistance, which means municipal water lines, natural gas lines and other conduits funnel massive amounts directly to our homes, schools and offices.
There are other obstacles to awareness, including the terms used to describe the problem. Most of us would raise our eyebrows if we knew utilities were dumping electricity on our lawns and houses. But the term “stray voltage” implies a phenomenon that’s unusual, random and somewhat mysterious – which is why the utilities love the term.
Furthermore, by definition, stray voltage is defined as “clean” electricity, which means a major source of the problem has been completely ignored. With the cooperation of government agencies and university researchers, the utilities developed a measurement protocol for stray voltage (although they routinely violate their own protocols).
The deck is stacked against those who complain. Very few farmers recognize they have a problem. Far fewer have the resources to take legal action to recover their losses. Even fewer are successful. And when farmers do win in court, the utilities usually engage in lengthy appeals.
In Wisconsin, utilities often fail to implement corrective actions mandated by the courts. In one case, a farmer the utility, whose practices had made it impossible him to raise dairy cows, insisted that it didn’t have to pay the court-ordered settlement until the farmer resumed dairying – and even though the utility had refused to correct the problem that drove him out of business in the first place. Such stories of utility intransigence are common.
Very few farmers, even those who ostensibly win in court, survive this scorched-earth policy. Utilities continue to portray these farmers as poor managers seeking to make a living off them.
They have repeated this charge so often that many farmers are reluctant to admit they have a problem.
Time after time, livestock on affected farms miraculously become healthy and productive when they are moved to electrically “clean” surroundings – although university researchers say these are simply anecdotal accounts, unworthy of consideration. Universities have also refused to conduct experiments that would confirm these accounts, saying such a study would be too complex.
Compounding the problem is the fact that electrical pollution takes several forms.
The frequency of electricity varies widely, from a few cycles per second to hundreds of thousand or millions of cycles per second. It’s analogous to sewage containing numerous bacteria and viruses. Utilities and university researchers say they can’t study it because they don’t know what frequencies to study. The most obvious solution – to stop dumping electricity into the environment – has never been seriously considered, even though there are well-known ways to correct and prevent the problem.
The utilities repeatedly – and incorrectly – assert that these solutions aren’t feasible or are dangerous.
Utilities, government agencies and “stray voltage” researchers at several land grant universities have cooperated to create an elaborate pseudo-science to mask the real problem. It’s a lucrative enterprise for them. They are paid handsomely to testify at trials – paid by the very ratepayers who are contesting the slow electrocution of their livestock (and of their families, although those with health complaints face even more obstacles and seldom seek judicial redress).
Researchers at land-grant universities play a key role in the cover-up, since they are still viewed as impartial by legislators and the courts. They have absolutely no credibility with farmers, however, and no longer give public presentations on their stray-voltage research lest they have to field embarrassing questions from those who have become knowledgeable about the topic.
Americans are subject to a veritable flood of electrical pollution. The livestock felled by so-called stray voltage are merely the proverbial canaries in the mine, warning us of the danger. The utilities and those working on their behalf have been enormously successful in convincing Americans that it’s a problem confined only to livestock and only to rural areas.
It’s a preposterous assumption since the same electrical distribution system is used throughout most of the country. Claims that the problem occurs only in rural areas assumes that electrons know when they leave the city limits.
Those working to keep the problem under wraps are enormously influential and are becoming even more so as our appetite for electricity increases. Individuals with concerns about electrical pollution quickly learn that their complaints are subject to the same system that has marginalized and vilified farmers.
While I believe that the health problems spawned by electrical pollution will eventually have to be addressed – witness the epidemic of “modern” ailments such as autism, asthma and chronic fatigue syndrome of supposedly inexplicable origins – this will not occur for decades, and then only when outrage reaches such a level that it threatens the existing political order.
Until then, you should protect themselves by some relatively simple measures that are within your control:
• Use a reliable gaussmeter to detect areas of high EMF. The failure to publicize risks means people subject themselves to avoidable risks by, for example, locating beds next to service entrances, placing beds over fluorescent lights mounted on the ceiling on the room below, or putting transmitters of baby monitors in cribs. A good source for gaussmeters and other information is lessemf.com.
• Because we’re all connected by the electrical grid, high-frequency dirty electricity is often carried over household wiring. The energy radiating from wires can transform rooms into something akin to a microwave. An inexpensive meter to determine these levels on household wiring is available at www.stetzerelectric.com. Avoid dimmer switches since their rheostats create very high levels of dirty electricity. Many of the measures designed to save electricity, such as compact fluorescent light bulbs, increase levels of dirty electricity.
• Poor and faulty wiring can also create problems.
• Continued exposure leads to electrical sensitivity, a problem that one researcher recently estimated may affect half the residents of industrialized nations. Those who are affected may have to take many other measures to protect their health, such as avoiding exposure to cell phones. Those measures are beyond the scope of this article. Information is readily available on the Internet.
• It’s much more difficult (and often impossible) to escape electrical pollution dumped into the ground and from sources such as cell towers. There are hundreds of studies documenting these dangers, but the industry always finds “experts” to conduct studies that discount the danger.
One of the simplest demonstrations of the danger involved is also one of the most revealing. When oscilloscopes, which show the wave forms of electricity, are connected to the ground and to the legs of a person, the same electricity traveling through the earth can be seen coursing through the person’s body.
Day after day, year after year, we are subject to similar assaults. Trillions of electrons routinely course through our bodies. No one can possibly think that’s an acceptable state of affairs. It continues only because we can’t see or feel it happening – until it’s too late.
The accounts of those who have been sickened by electrical pollution are legion. The health of a woman and her children, who faced a cluster of mysterious ailments, improved when levels of electrical pollution declined. A woman who was nearly incapacitated by chronic fatigue system no longer has to remain in bed following corrective action. A nurse in a school in Wisconsin reports that students no longer need their asthma medication when electrical conditions improved.
It is shameful and criminal that our universities, legislators and government agencies refuse to take these accounts seriously.
Farmers have tried to warn us. We need to listen.
Kurt Gutknecht was fired as editor of the Wisconsin Agriculturist after he continued to report on electrical pollution.
