We looked at a house for sale this afternoon and are seriously considering it but there is a giant hydro tower on the corner of the property about 400 feet from the house.
The power lines don’t run directly over the house, but at an angle 300 to 400 feet away.
I’ve read various articles about higher cancer rates etc, but these were only opinion pieces. Have there been any conclusive studies done?
If we love the house; is this a deal breaker?
Thanks
Gus
There is no scientific evidence showing a correlation between power lines and cancer rates.
What tends to happen is that visible power lines lower property values, and lower incomes are associated – very slightly – with higher disease rates, due to poorer nutrition, less access to healthcare, and so on.
can you define hydro tower? I am not familiar with the term.
Apparently it’s a term used in some parts of Canada for an electrical transmission tower.
As friedo says there’s never been any proven health effect from the things. Personally I wouldn’t worry about it.
Naturally I cannot now find it, but just recently there was a story over here of cyclists getting small electric shocks when cycling near (maybe underneath) power transmission cables.
Personally, I wouldn’t touch the thing with a bargepole. 
Back in the late 60s or early 70s, some insurance guys figured out that people who live next to power lines don’t live as long as people who don’t. Insurance guys get paid big bucks to figure statistical stuff like this out since it decides how the insurance companies set their rates, but for a long time, not many people except the insurance guys really seemed to care about it. Then, in the late 70s, there was a study done which linked power lines to childhood leukemia. This study was later discredited, but the genie was out of the bottle, so to speak, and the idea that power lines were somehow bad for you was now in the public mind.
In the 80s things really went nuts. Most scientific folks thought power lines were safe, but very little research had been done on the subject. A lot of places, especially schools, wanted some assurance that nearby power lines were not causing harm, so so-called “experts” pulled numbers out of their backsides and started walking around carrying field strength meters and proclaiming what areas were safe and what areas weren’t. A lot of idiots with field strength meters made an awful lot of money during this time.
During the 80s, cell phones also went from these huge things about the size of a brick and expensive enough that only Miami detectives could afford (if their names were Crockett and Tubbs) to something smaller and affordable enough that real people could buy them. A lot of folks made the fairly obvious connection that if power line fields could be harmful then cell phone radiation could be harmful as well, so that’s when the whole cell phones cause cancer thing really took off.
Tons and tons of money started pouring into research. Fast forward a couple of decades, and now numerous studies have been done, and not one of them has managed to prove a link between either cell phones or power lines and something bad like cancer. This isn’t to say that no studies have found anything at all. To the contrary, many studies have found some sort of link, but none of these studies so far have held up to peer review and follow-up studies. Unfortunately, the way these things are reported in the press, the initial study ends up being front page news. “POWER LINES KILL!” makes a great headline. “Oh, yeah, sorry, we didn’t find anything after all” isn’t quite as much of a headline grabber, and doesn’t make the front page, and may not even make it into the newspaper at all. This gives the public the idea that there is more scientific support for a connection between power lines and cancer (or cell phones and cancer) than there really is.
So, just to be clear, nobody has proven anything yet. This of course doesn’t mean there isn’t something to be found here. It could be that we just haven’t figured out how to find it yet.
Statistically though, people who live next to power lines don’t live as long as those who don’t. One of my professors in college was an early researcher into all of this, and he said it’s quite possible that people who choose to live healthy lifestyles simply choose not to live next to power lines. With all of the money that’s been poured into research on this with no results yet so far, it’s starting to look like he may have been right.
That said, there is this idea in the public mind that power lines are somehow bad, so having the lines on or near your property will affect the value of the home, and will make it more difficult to sell should you decide to move out of it at some later date.
I think the primary reason that power lines decrease property values is simply that they’re ugly. Most people aren’t particularly paranoid about them.
Is listening to AM radio a big deal for you? Cause AM reception is horrible near power lines. No more listening to the ball game on the radio while sitting on the back deck.
They tend to buzz a lot in wet weather which can be annoying.
I’d love to know if that’s cause and effect, or effect and cause. In other words, which scenario is correct?
Power transmission lines and towers are directly harmful to humans.
or
Humans that live near power lines do so because being willing to live near the big ugly thing enables them to afford a house they otherwise could not. However, they still can’t afford regular preventive medical care, so as a broad class, they die off earlier from very preventable illnesses.
Has anyone ever set out to do a real cohort study? I’m envisioning something where they take pairs or groups of people with common links such as “elementary school teachers living in the same zip code and earning the same income” or “identical twins” and half of the group lives near power lines and the other half does not.
My real estate agent was very concerned that the house I ended up buying is a block from the substation! Horrors! (You can’t see it, by the way, from the house.)
Living a block from the substation is AWESOME. I don’t think my power has ever gone out for more than twenty minutes, and that’s only happened once. Generally speaking, when the rest of the city goes dark we don’t even know about it.
Yes, because in much of Canada, particularly in Ontario and Quebec, electricity is mainly generated hyrdoelectrically. So the power companies are called the “hydro” companies. In some cases, that’s part of the official name of the company, such as Hydro Quebec and Ontario Hydro.
So the electric companies are called hydro. And the water companies are called?
Gouging bastards?
(Actually I’m on my own well, but certainly hear enough about the incrementally rising water rates in just about every municipality. After years of driving home the message of conservation, rates have had to go up dramatically to cover the reduced usage. How’s them apples?)
Also digital TV is much more effected by power lines than analog TV was.
My uncle won a case against the power company, because the lines induced a shock to their milking cows in the stalls no matter what they installed to prevent this. The high voltage towers were grounded to earth near them. The shock was a couple volts that no rewiring of the barn could remove from the stanchions regardless of what the utility said was necessary.
And I’ll bet that the one time it happened was about 50 years ago, too.
For what it’s worth:
Prior to the 17 years I worked with them, the New York State regional agency I used to work for was faced with a proposal for a new high-voltage long-distance electrical transmission line across their region, and ordered up an environmental and health-effects study. Their conclusions:[ul]
[li]There is no credible evidence of any medical ill effects on most HV lines, up to 345 kV[/li][li]There is a smattering of evidence suggestive of but not proving that the measurable induction field from 765 kV lines has a marked ill effect on health. (See earlier posts on why post hoc is not necessarily propter hoc.[/li][li]The inductive field has measurable but evidently minor effects on fauna. No significant evidence of effects on flora.[/li][li]Aesthetic effects are of course significant, and may be deleterious to the local economy – with consequent ripple effects. (E.g., the wilderness-loving elderly doctor sold off his retirement home after they put in the lines, hence is not available in emergencies any more.)[/li][/ul]
Are there any citations for this as I am not aware of any. I understood that statistical analysis didn’t show anything.
Another issue with power lines on your property is that you may be limited in the placement and size of trees. Here in the Seattle area, it was announced that you could be hit with a $1 million fine if you refuse to let the power company cut trees and then they cause an outage.
Maybe the link is between a lack of trees and cancer? 
Seriously, I’ve done some looking into the research on this, and no one can show anything better than correlation. Correlational studies are really just invitations for further research. They produce such interesting results as a strong correlation between ice cream sales and drowning deaths.
Ironically, when I used to live next door to substation, we’d have power outages all the time. You could count on at least 3-4 nights a year with no power, and a 1-2 hour outage about twice a month.
The only upside was that transformers make really cool sparks/explosions when they go.