ELECTRICITY

We all have electrical current running through our bodies, but being exposed to too much can be a bad thing.
One of my sons is an electrician who was a little Tom Sawyer when he was a child. He was the only one of my children who repeatedly put knives in the sockets, despite getting a shock. When he told me what he wanted to do for a living, I was worried. My son had a great apprenticeship set up to work with high power lines in Calgary. At the last minute, he backed out.
He told me that he had heard so many horror stories about other electricians getting fried or at the very least hurt. Knowing that his attention often wandered, my boy did the best thing for himself, he decided to go the business and residential route to become an electrician, not the high power line route.
Since then, my electrician son has returned to school to get a diploma in instrumentation. What convinced him, among other things, was how electrical power was affecting him. There were times when he had to go to sub stations. Those little cement buildings surrounded by chain fences with barbed wire at the top. Anyway, when my son would get out of his vehicle at these stations, he could feel the hair on his head stand on end as well as all the hair on his arms and legs. I quote him now, “I felt as though my DNA was changing.”

There are a couple of subdivisions that I drive through every day that have huge electrical triangular towers positioned in a long strung out line. These towers are close to some of the houses and I wonder how the nearby residents will be affected.

I grew up in Toronto. One of my best friends lived in a new subdivision (at that time) called Bridlewood. Across from her house was an open field with a long line of these towers. The towers ran through the middle of Bridlewood. A few years back, a study was done and it was discovered that the residents of Bridlewood had the highest incidence of leukemia in Canada.

My son, the electrician will not even consider buying a house near power lines. Just recently, an Alberta power company managed to push through their agenda for these same towers to be built close to a large residential area. The government backed the power company despite tremendous protests from the residents. How do these people sleep at night?