When Commonwealth Edison installed a transmission tower along the old railroad yards just southeast of Garfield Boulevard (55th Street) and the Dan Ryan, it wasn’t cause for alarm. That was in March, long before people in the neighborhood knew much about electric and magnetic fields or the damage they might cause inside the body.
But south-side residents who live along the lines are not convinced. “No one wants to live next to an electrical line,” says Sandra Johnson, who lives around the corner from one of the newly erected towers. “We joke that if the lights go down we’ll be OK because we’ll just glow in the dark. We laugh, but it’s really not so funny.”
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Commonwealth Edison was drawn to this obscure, predominantly black, working-class section of Washington Park by the railroad line that runs past the neighborhood on its way to the Loop. Edison prefers to install transmission lines along railroad property because it’s cheaper and easier to obtain a right-of-way. This particular transmission line will send more electricity to the Loop from a generating station in south-suburban Burnham.
The real fear isn’t the towers themselves, of course; it’s what will flow through the lines to be run between the towers. In particular, the residents are worried about the side effects of electric and magnetic fields (EMFs).
The Illinois Department of Public Health’s fact sheet, published before the Swedish study, is less conclusive. “Is exposure to EMF harmful? No one knows for sure,” the fact sheet reads. “Although it is possible to measure the fields and compute the currents produced, scientists do not know which, if any, of these quantities might affect health. . . . They have learned through their research that EMFs can produce a variety of biological effects, such as changes in the levels of specific chemicals in the body and certain changes in nervous system function. Whether any of the biological effects can lead to health risks is not known. Much research is still needed.”
On that last point, Lazar vehemently disagrees. “If you consider all the costs it would probably be less expensive to bury the lines,” he says. “Think of all the outages we have had due to storms. Edison says these are acts of God. But you could protect against that by going underground. If you add in the health risks from the transmission wires, it’s a foregone conclusion that society really ought to have a buried system.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Bruce Powell.
