Submitted by Melissa Levine, November 4, 2011

Southern California Edison started installing Smart Meters in our Turtle Rock/Turtle Ridge neighborhood on October 17, 2011.  Neither we (nor a great many of our neighbors) received or saw any notice from SCE.  Most people missed the opportunity to get on the delay list.  A few of my neighbors were on the delay list, but Edison installed the meters anyway.  This is because Edison created a “delay to the delay list,” i.e. a 7-day waiting period before the person’s name on the delay list would be activated.  This, in effect, allowed Edison to ignore the order that the CPUC gave, that customers would have a right to be on the delay list.

I am not only worried about health effects of my family being exposed to the 24/7 RF radiation from my neighbors’ two Smart Meters just a few feet from our property pointing toward my children’s rooms and our garden, but about the health effects from Smart Meters to others, including the elderly and frail (RF radiation has been found to cause DNA breakage and thus could contribute to Alzheimer’s) .  In May, 2011, the World Health Organization classified radio-frequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans.

Children, especially,  are more vulnerable to RF radiation.  Many of these meters have been installed in multifamily housing. They are on the walls of the bedrooms where children sleep and play.  They are, according to  environmental engineer Cindy Sage, not comparable to cell phones but (if they are on the outside walls of bedrooms) more like sleeping next to “mini cell towers.”    My husband, who is a board certified physician in anatomic and clinical pathology,  has said, “We do not want our children or the children in our neighborhood to be guinea pigs in a 10 year RF exposure experiment.”

We request that Smart Meters be removed from our neighborhood.  We request, because the mesh network system emits RF 24/7 and washes our entire neighborhood in RF radiation, that you approve not just a case-by-case opt out, but a neighborhood opt out.  We further request that this neighborhood opt out be available for renters and others, many with small children, who live in multi-family units. We request that schools and hospitals also be allowed to keep their analog meters.  We request in the interests of Public Health and the “precautionary principle,” that the right to opt out of the Smart Meters be available for all Californians.

Melissa Levine

Note: This is a slightly revised version of an e-mail I sent via EMF Safety Network. Please regard this as my revised submission.