A Tale of Two Meters
In Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, London was the safe haven across the channel from tumultuous Paris during the French Revolution. Likewise, in Pennsylvania, there are townships that procure electricity for their residents and provide a safe haven from advanced metering infrastructure (“AMI meter” or “smart meters”). These townships offer a stark contrast from the electrosmog prevalent in Philadelphia.
This city of 1.5 million hosts the greatest concentration of smart meters in PA. While Philadelphia is imbued in radiofrequency (RF) radiation from multiple sources, the intense power density of RF signals emitted by smart meters is of particular concern. This has been carefully noted in the analysis of Mr. Ronald Powell, Ph.D. in applied physics from Harvard University, his chart illustrates the power density of smart meters relative to peer-reviewed studies of the levels at which biological effects occur.
Another parallel is that your home is considered your sanctuary and you choose what goes into your home. You can mitigate RF sources in your home by hardwiring your internet, buying non-smart appliances, or living without a microwave, smart phone, or consciously limiting your exposure time with these devices. The smart meter is the only source of RF radiation that is mandated for installation in PA without any consent of the residents, several of whom have tried to fight this involuntary installation, but have not succeeded. Your consent is also denied with the smart meters installed at your child’s school, which may have a bank of 10 smart meters that are on the other side of your child’s classroom.
PECO is the largest electric utility in PA and has chosen not to grant customers a smart meter opt-out, despite the fact that PECO is a subsidiary of Exelon, and Exelon’s other subsidiaries offer its customers an opt-out policy for an analog meter or at least a non-smart meter in the case of Baltimore Gas & Electric (BGE). Below is a table of PECO’s parent company (Exelon)’s other subsidiaries’ customer service opt-out policies.
It should be further noted that PECO does not provide smart meters for its York County electric customers and insults those who are concerned about smart meters by telling concerned customers that they can relocate the smart meter, at their expense, to a safe distance 30-50’ from their property. In essence, PECO makes an unadulterated admission that the smart meter may be harmful by recommending this 30-50’ separation from living quarters.
Laura Murphy, Ph.D., is one of the very EMF-sensitive plaintiffs who made it to the PA Supreme Court seeking an accommodation to remove PECO’s smart meter. This case was mentioned in a prior article: on appeal, the PA Supreme Court reversed the PA Commonwealth Court’s ruling that Pennsylvania’s Act 129 of 2008 was a smart meter opt-in law. Both courts interpreted the same wording and came to opposite conclusions: “Smart meters are to be furnished upon request from a customer that agrees to pay the cost of the meter.” The PA Supreme Court ruled in PECO/PUC’s favor that Act 129 mandated smart meter installation, unless the customer could prove conclusively that such an installation would violate PUC Section 1501 for safe service. The Court ruled that none of the customers, including Dr. Murphy, had proven violations of Section 1501. One PA Supreme Court judge dissented and issued an opinion stating that the other PA Supreme Court judges’ conclusive standard is an unfair burden of proof on utility customers that is contrary to civil law.
Dr. Murphy’s EMF hypersensitivity was triggered by a head injury (concussion) after a car accident, prior to that she was a successful lawyer who was always on her phone and using wireless communication without any knowledge of the RF radiation emitted. While Dr. Murphy is disappointed that the PA Supreme Court did not uphold the law as stipulated in PA Act 129, she is investigating going off-grid, rather than risk her health from a forced smart meter. She notes, “One bone the PA Supreme Court threw to utility customers, which is buried in a footnote (5) of the PA Supreme Court’s opinion, is that a utility has discretion to grant smart meter accommodations as a customer service policy.” Thus, PECO should implement the same opt-out policies of Exelon’s other subsidiaries in providing an analog meter to customers who request one.
Gene Bazan, Secretary of PA Smart Meter Work Group and a Board Member of Pennsylvanians for Safe Technology, has been working for over five years with members, fellow Formal Complainants before the PUC, and sympathetic legislators to restore PA Act 129 as it was written and passed: as an opt-in law for smart meters. He says, “Misconstruing the law, the PUC and electric utilities have turned the law into a ‘smart-meter mandate for all.’ Water and gas companies are now also rolling out smart meters for their customers. The courts have flip-flopped. In August 2022, the PA Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s correct finding that Act 129 did not mandate smart meters.”
At one PUC hearing, where a complainant provided scientific evidence on RF radiation hazards, an attendee overheard an exchange between two judges in a “hot mic” episode during a recess. One judge whispered to the other judge. “Do you suppose that [RF radiation] is what’s causing my headaches?” The other judge quickly hissed, “Shhhh!” Shushing was also a tactic used by PA legislators with PA Act 50, which allows unfettered siting of small cell facilities (i.e. 5G). At public committee meetings and hearings prior to passage of Act 50, attendees who wished to speak and present evidence against the proposed law were denied that right, violating PA’s Sunshine Law. By contrast, lobbyists for telecoms were invited to speak. While the courts and lawmakers whose duty it is to protect consumer and individual rights have failed in the case of the PA smart meter, an individual employee at PECO acted humanely to allow Alexia McKnight, DVM, DACVR, an equine radiologist in Delaware County, to live peacefully without a smart meter.
Alexia is one of a dozen smart-meter complainants who have made it to the PA Commonwealth Court. She has had her smart meter removed twice. The second time was through the mercy of a now former PECO employee, who sympathized with Alexia’s debilitating symptoms following the smart meter installations (e.g. chronic headaches, insomnia, mood alterations, memory loss, cognitive dysfunction, cardiac arrhythmia), but she fears a forced smart meter installation for a third time by PECO.
While Alexia was a recipient of kindness from a PECO employee, Donna Bervinchak faced the opposite when an involuntary smart meter installation was forced upon her by PPL. Donna relates her story: “I first got sick in San Francisco, CA after sleeping 20 feet from a bank of smart meters on my apartment building. Within 4 months I was near death. My friends rescued me and took me to the country where they lived off grid and I got better and within a week I returned to SF and my health went downhill immediately. I then moved to Pennsylvania, where I grew up. I told my whole story to the PUC and they sent lawyers after me and I fought for 3 years until they terminated my electricity. Me and my brothers are living without electricity in suburbia now for 4 years.”
Why would someone like Donna live four years without electricity to avoid being inundated incessantly with RF signals from the smart meter? Although we are all sensitive to man-made electromagnetic fields (EMFs, which includes RF), some people have a condition called electro-hypersensitivity (EHS), also known as the “Havana syndrome”, that is induced by man-made EMFs and is estimated to affect ~5% of the population. With the abundance in RF signals emanating from wireless devices and infrastructure, another condition drastically on the rise is Alzheimer’s Disease (AD).
Like A Tale of Two Cities brutal fallout of tyrannical and inhumane policies of aristocrats in revolutionary France, the abundance of RF radiation unleashed on the masses, particularly vulnerable children and those within densely populated areas, could bring us to a dire state of universal AD. A recent analysis by Dr. Martin Pall, Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry & Basic Medical Services of WSU, reviewed 18 research findings that collectively provide powerful evidence for EMF causation of AD: “Rats exposed to pulsed EMFs every day are reported to develop universal or near universal very early onset neurodegeneration, including AD; these findings are superficially similar to humans with digital dementia.
Both animal and human studies, discussed above, show that EMFs can not only greatly increase the incidence of AD, but can also decrease the latency period; the human latency of AD may decrease from about 25 years to perhaps 5 or 10 years. This means that it is possible that exposures we already have, 5G and possibly also 4G and smart meters, may have already caused the ultimate disaster, but we do not know it yet because we are still in the latency period.” This is foreshadowed by AD striking younger people, with a rapid drop in the age of onset of cognitive decline, occurring more frequently around age 45, which is 15- 20 years earlier than in prior generations. In some cases, early onset of AD occurs around age 30, which was previously unheard of.