1) We should all pay attention to what is happening on Salt Spring Island, with the need for improved emergency response to be paired with increased towers and transmitters for Rogers. Rogers isn’t partnering with CREST out of the goodness of its heart. People are told about CREST, and by the way it will be on a new Rogers tower. If people argue about another Rogers tower, the emergency response could be in jeopardy. This article was in the Times Colonist today. CREST (https://crest.ca/online-training/) is the emergency responder system for the Capital Region on Vancouver Island. https://crest.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/CREST-Annual-Report-2019.pdf
Please let me know if this is happening in your area.
(click on photos to enlarge)
Emergency radio upgrade ends complaints about dead zones, garbled communication
“The improved CREST system has been fully operational since late fall after a four-year, $24.5-million upgrade that moved the system onto a fully digital platform that meets world standards for public safety.
The phased-in upgrade included new transmission towers, refurbishing older ones and programming and deploying 3,000 new radios for the 50 emergency-response agencies in the region….
Horth said the system has plenty of room to grow with the region. “Our system is capable of supporting 100 [communication towers] — it’s totally scalable,” he said.
While there are still gaps in the region — parts of the Gulf Islands and between Otter Point, Shirley and Port Renfrew, for example —CREST is working with Roger’s Communications on the possibility of piggybacking on new towers the company has planned for those areas, Horth said.”
2) On Earth Day, April 22nd, Miguel Coma and Katie Singer will speak at the European Broadcasting Union’s Sustainability Summit about defining our terms before we call 5G sustainable.
https://tech.ebu.ch/events/sustainability2021
8 hours ahead of PDT. I have asked if the events will be recorded to be made available and will let you know what I hear back.
3) We all know people who are addicted to their wireless gadgets — cell phones, earbuds, etc. –– which has often been compared to tobacco addiction. Back many years ago, there were ads on TV warning people about smoking. One in particular stays with me. It was of a wrinkled woman who said she was in her 40s (she looked 90), smoking through a tracheotomy tube. If I recall correctly, she said something like “I’d give up 10 years of my life to smoke.” Here is a similar ad:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/woman-who-smoked-from-hole-in-throat-in-anti-smoking-ad-dies/
We need to have an advertising campaign showing beautiful young people with shaved heads, with scars from surgery to remove brain tumors, using their cell phones.
4) Below is a letter to the Ombudsperson complaining about smeters and her treatment by BC Hydro. Many of us have suffered similar threats, deceit, and paid a lot of money (has it been accounted for yet?) to delay having a dangerous device put on our homes, and many of us continue to pay to have one hazard — the RF-emitting transmitter — disabled, while still facing others. We all should write and push to have the Clean Energy Act reversed, allowing us to have a safe analog meter.
Letters:
From: Lavonne Garnett (name given with permission)
To: info@bcombudsperson.ca, “Office PREM OfficeofthePremier, EX” <Premier@gov.bc.ca>, “adrian dix mla” <adrian.dix.mla@leg.bc.ca>, “Bonnie Henry” <Bonnie.Henry@gove.bc.ca>, “sheila malcolmson MLA” <sheila.malcolmson.MLA@leg.bc.ca>
Cc: “sonia furstenau mla” <sonia.furstenau.MLA@leg.bc.ca>, “doug routley” <douglas.routley.mla@leg.bc.ca>, info@viha.ca, CEOExecutiveAssistant@viha.ca
Sent: April 13, 2021
Subject: Complaint
To the Ombudsman and elected officials:
This letter is long, because it seems no one in government understands, so I think this topic needs to be elucidated.
I am writing to complain about BC Hydro’s threats to customers to take their analogue meters and replace them with Smart Meters (SM). People who have continued to pay the extra fee to keep their analogues have done so, because they fear for their safety, either through knowledge and/or experience of reported fires or that SM radiation is detrimental to health. After BC Hydro told customers that still have analogues that they would not exchange meters during this pandemic, they recently informed them that they would replace them after April 13.
One family that I know, who I believe are in process of writing to your office, consists of a husband with heart problems, a wife and son, who are both electro-hypersensitive, and suffered with a previous SM installation, whereby their analogue was returned. Another person, who is also electro-hypersensitive also lives in fear for her life, if her analogue is replaced with a SM. Please note that Radio Off SMs emit pulsed, signals as they change direct current to alternating current for functioning of the SMs. These pulsed signals send electromagnetic radiation onto household wiring and through the walls into rooms, so they are NOT a solution. Furthermore, SMs have not received any professional fire safety designations.
Another person is highly stressed and tired of fighting off BC Hydro. She also is living in great fear for her life. I have been told of a fourth person, who feels she has to fight for her life. I know an electrician, who had a massive stroke, shortly after a SM was put on his home; an elderly woman who after she had Wi-Fi and a SM installed in her home, developed dementia and died within 2 years; a woman who could not understand why her memory was failing, where I found the readings in her home with a SM to be 5,000 times higher than the low ambient reading in our now mitigated home; a teenager, who started to have seizures when students had to stay home during this pandemic, was indoors all the time, exposed to SMs outside his bedroom, as well as to Wi-Fi in the family’s apartment and from the neighbour’s Wi-Fi; others, with Wi-Fi and SMs, who tell me they are having memory problems. People need to be educated before they develop problems.
I personally know 2 persons, each with analogue meters, who went away for a week-end, and felt violated to find SMs on their homes, while they were paying to keep their analogues. This means that BC Hydro is surveilling people, and invading their privacy.
I don’t mean to frighten people on the Bcc line, but I think I need to warn everyone, because September 18, 2019, BC Hydro told us that the last thing they wanted to do was turn our power off and they would like to negotiate to make things right. On September 19, they turned our power off, with no opportunity to negotiate. September 20, we begged to have our power returned, but were refused, unless we had SMs. My husband gave in, because his hard-earned farm produce had just been harvested and put into a walk-in cooler. In one week of the SM installation, my husband had a stroke, a week later a second stroke, and I experienced cognitive and memory dysfunction. If we had known the harm would be so serious and nearly lethal, it would have been better to live without electricity and waste the produce.
I wrote to the Ombudsman’s office, and after a long time, was informed that your office could not do anything, and that our MLA could. I again contacted our MLA, and was repeatedly told he could do nothing. I contacted the Green Party, and while they were sympathetic, ultimately this topic, so far as I know, never reached the Legislature. If the Ombudsman’s Office cannot do anything and our MLA, and Premier, and opposition parties cannot do anything to protect people’s lives, who can, or will?
After my husband’s strokes and my cognitive dysfunction, I wrote a letter to Citizens for Safe Technology, desperate for help. Someone read my letter that was posted for all to read and wrote to our MLA Doug Routley, with advice on how we could protect ourselves. He did not forward the E-mail. Fortunately, this person found our phone number and called me. She provided guidance for us, though we had to pay over $2,000 for mitigation devices and installation. To place meters on poles at a distance from the home costs in the range of $6,000-10,000, something we did not think was justifiably safer, because along with the exorbitant price, the SM pulsed electricity would still come into our home.
Three of our bedrooms have been rendered unusable, because they are on the SM wall. Nineteen months later, I still sleep on the living room floor. This is an unconscionable situation we have been put into, in a country that claims to be democratic.
This is a human rights issue. Our Canadian Charter of Rights states that we have the right to life, liberty and security of person, including physical and psychological security of person, and safety and enjoyment of property. My husband and I were denied the CHOICE of an analogue meter that did not harm us in the past over an electric meter that we knew created pulsed electricity to add to the wiring in our home.
One of the problems with the issue around electromagnetic radiation is that people either know or understand little about it, or they prefer not to be mired with having to learn about the topic and deal with the associated problems. Like the tobacco industry’s lobbying and misleading the public, it took years, before people learned that smoking and second-hand smoke was affecting their lives. Tobacco smoke with all the carcinogens/toxins stress the immune system. So does man-made electricity, especially when pulsed and erratic, as evidenced with a radio-frequency meter. This is what it all boils down to, the immune system; and, as Dr. Bonnie Henry says, everyone responds to the virus differently, we also know everyone responds differently to other stressors, including EMR.
Another problem is that the technology industries lobby governments, which somehow fail to update Health Canada Safety Code 6, which does not include studies, regarding the harms of cell phones, cordless phones, appliances, electrical wiring, Wi-Fi and the like.
As for BC Hydro, it needs to be held to account for:
* Misleading people into thinking they have reprieve, and then using the tactic of short notification that they will lose their analogue meter.
* Coercion by turning people’s power off and holding them ransom, until they accept a SM.
* Surveillance and invasion of privacy by replacing, without permission, analogue meters with SMs.
* Charging customers for keeping their analogues, when they had paid monthly fees to keep themselves safe, and then reneging on the contract of paying to keep the analogues. This is how we understood the payment and we were not offered informed consent, telling us we would lose this program.
* Failing to provide informed consent, by explaining that SMs, both Radio On and Off, emit pulsed radiation that can be harmful to health.
* Imposing SMs on homes without any information or financial help to mitigate the added effects of SM radiation.
I think the BC Government needs to form a committee to study electromagnetic energy, learn how to mitigate it, educate the public, and provide choice, and funding to pay to mitigate, if necessary. Our government should purchase electrical measurement meters (electric, magnetic and radio-frequencies) and make them available in public libraries, city halls, medical clinics, VIHA, so people can ascertain the electric radiation in their homes and learn how to mitigate.
More IMMEDIATE AND URGENT, our government needs to put a stop to any installation of Smart Meters to replace analogue meters on the homes of people, who have kept their analogues this long, because they fear for their lives.
Either we live in a democracy where we have choice to be and feel safe, or we live in a despotic dictatorship that turns a blind eye to vulnerable people pleading for recognition of their plight. To carry on with the status quo is an abomination. It is on your watch to do right for your citizens.
Lavonne Garnett
Sharon Noble, Director, Coalition to Stop Smart Meters
“Human decision-making is complex. On our own, our tendency to yield to short-term temptations, and even to addictions, may be too strong for our rational, long-term planning.” Peter Singer