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NASA Engineer Opposes Small Cells in Piedmont, CA

Watch CBS-KPIX, Channel 5 news coverage: Nov 15, 2017 @ 6:00 pm
re: Dangerous Crown Castle/Verizon Cell Towers in Piedmont, CA

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Nasa Engineer, Peter Harvey Being Interviewed by CBS-KPIX News, SF Bay Area

Link to original letter in the public record.

November 15, 2017

City Council Members
City of Piedmont, CA
120 Vista Avenue
Piedmont, CA 94611
(510) 420-3040

Re: Deny All Nine Crown Castle/Verizon So-Called "Small Cell" Cell Tower Applications for Piedmont

Dear Piedmont City Council Members,

I fear that you have no interest in reading this letter. It is clear to me that you have not read my previous letters, or you could not understand them. As I stated in September, if you approved any of the nine Crown Castle/Verizon So-Called "Small Cell" Cell Tower applications targeting Piedmont, I would move out. So, I have purchased another house and am leaving Piedmont. I expect I will not be alone.

I moved my family to Piedmont because of the good reputation of the schools. However, your acquiescence to irradiating the schools and sidewalks around the recreation center is beyond my imagination. I can’t figure out how kids will walk to school, recreation center or pool without being in the high-radiation beam of these cell towers that will bracket the recreation center and pool.


The babies learning to swim at the wading pool will be irradiated
by a cell tower only 30 steps from their unprotected bodies.

Shame on you. Shame on you. Shame on all of you!

If you approve the 314 Wildwood tower, this would enclose three Piedmont schools with high power radiation from four cell phone towers and certify Piedmont as the school system to avoid. Over the previous two months, you have demonstrated that you ignore every public statement of fact regarding this issue. Your legal counsel has clearly no experience in this area, and your staff has been working against the residents’ best interests.

For example:

  • There is sufficient Verizon coverage, and we demonstrated that there is NO SIGNIFICANT GAP in Verizon coverage in Piedmont. Crown Castle/Verizon did not prove their case, as they must, to allow them to place cell towers in Piedmont. Piedmont residents proved in multiple on-site measurements and showed videos at the 10/02/17 City Council meeting. Sherk also showed in multiple meetings that Verizon’s own maps showed FULL COVERAGE for PIEDMONT — for voice, text and data services .

How is it that your senior planner can accept Crown Castle’s word that there is insufficient coverage? That’s total, unadulterated horse shit. And you sat there doing nothing. How is it that your legal counsel said that "coverage" and "capacity" are essentially the same? That’s bad legal advice. And you simply accepted it.

Shame on you!

  • There are ADA laws protecting people with EMS, and you have simply ignored their testimony.

How is it that your legal counsel used a single case in which Electromagnetic Sensitivity (EMS) was not considered an ADA-recognized issue? That shows how little he knows and how little you know. It proves that there is a legal definition of EMS that has been recognizes by the Federal Architectural Access Board since 2002. Yet, you dismissed the needs of 3% of Piedmont residents who have this environmentally-induced disability. They can’t walk downtown without getting sick. Due to Fire Station cell towers, Mulberry’s already has an outrageous 5,400 microwatts per square meter of microwave radiation. Just know that, with your recent decisions, the microwave radiation levels will be going up in Piedmont and the kids will be bathing in it.

Shame on you!

  • Piedmonters young and old rallied to show you how they do not want these so-called "Small Cell" cell towers in their town. Hundreds of letters were sent to you, while there was only a single letter in support of these Crown Castle/Verizon cell towers. We heard impassioned speeches from children who will be irradiated. And from their well-informed mothers and fathers.

How is it that you would decide their lives weren’t worth fighting for? A law suit might cost the city $200,000. Are you kidding? There are kid’s lives at stake here.


How much is the treatment for Leukemia? How many children
are you willing to sacrifice so the City of Piedmont
doesn’t use its "community fund?" Is a garden party
more important than a child’s life?

What will you do when Piedmont children start having Leukemias and Lymphomas? I already sent you the studies showing the connection between cell towers and these illnesses. In Spain, they dismantled a cell tower near a school that had five case of Leukemia and Lymphoma in the span of a year.

Shame on you!

  • Microwave radiation damages and kills trees. I’ve provided overwhelming scientific reports on this subject, including a 10-year study of tree damage correlated to microwave power. Yet you have managed to ignored them all.

Shame on you!

  • Microwave radiation damages birds and insects. I’ve provided numerous scientific reports on this subject, showing how microwaves have upset homing pigeons and natural navigational abilities of migratory birds. When a tower goes up, nearby birds either move their nests or face a decline in their offspring. Birds staying near a tower often never finish building their nest in their apparent confusion. Insects are profoundly affected by radiation. A ten-minute per day cell phone placement in a bee-hive will cause the bees to stop honey production, lose interest in procreation, and the bee hive will die in a matter of 5 weeks. A tiny fraction of a cell tower’s power, 40 microwatts, will kill bird embryos. Yet, you simply ignored all of these scientific reports.

Shame on you!

  • Microwave radiation below FCC limits produces cancers in rats. I’ve provided references to the National Toxicology Program study which shows brain and heart tumors in rats at levels below those allowed by the FCC. The NTP study also confirms that DNA breakage is a function of intensity and of duration. This means that children need to be protected above all else. They have the longest exposure duration. However, you have ignored these studies.

Shame on you!

  • Home values will decline because of your decisions. It is apparent that you do not care about the people in Piedmont, but they deserve better. Their homes are usually a large fraction of their wealth and your decisions cause them to lose a large fraction of their wealth — just so that you City Council Members can relax. I understand that part of the agreement between Piedmont and Crown is that you make residents sue Crown instead of Piedmont if anything bad happens. To that I say:

Shame on you!

I really hope that Piedmont will come to its senses and reject all of these Crown Castle/Verizon so-called "Small Cell" cell towers.

Crown Castle is not acting in good faith as a public utility. It serves a "for-profit" wireless company, and its designation as a California Public Utility should be challenged rather than accepted by Piedmont. It’s track record shows that it does not serve the population at large, which is a requirement of a public utility. Instead, Crown only serves wealthy communities where the profit margins are better. Piedmont should challenge Crown’s "public utility" designation, since it would eliminate their ability to bully their way into town.

I hope you deny the 314 Wildwood application. The drawings have been wrong from the beginning, the vault will be too noisy to meet Piedmont noise regulations and the microwave transmitter at 314 Wildwood is double than the size the other three Crown Castle/Verizon cell towers the City Council recently approved. Moreover, the noise from the equipment vault will be 8 times louder than the nighttime ambient background noise.

Please do not approve the Crown Castle/Verizon so-called "Small Cell" Cell tower application for 314 Wildwood at the upcoming Piedmont City Council meeting.

Best regards,

Peter Harvey, formerly 123 Highland Ave.


Peter R Harvey has been a member of the University of California Berkeley Physics department, Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL), for more than four decades. He holds a MS degree in computer science from UC. He has developed more than 30 NASA space instruments and six spacecraft which communicate via microwave to the SSL-developed 10-meter S-band Berkeley Ground Station. He has published more than 34 scientific papers which have been cited in other scientific publications more than 2,900 times. He is currently supporting NASA’s Parker Solar Probe spacecraft as it goes through pre-launch testing.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/themis/mission/harvey_bio.html