By Ronitte Libedinsky
The mobile phone company Nextel has proposed a plan to construct a 60-foot-tall pine-shaped telecommunications tower at the southwest corner of the Sunset Reservoir, near Quintara Street and 28th Avenue.
Complete with life-like branches and fake bark, the tower will hold up to 12 antennae to provide better mobile phone service for Nextel clients throughout the Sunset neighborhood, said Corey Alvin, a former zoning administrator now working as a contractor for Nextel.
“The plan to build a wireless telecommunications tower in the Sunset is based on customer complaints about the lack of adequate coverage and dropped calls in the neighborhood,” Alvin said.
Yet some residents in the neighborhood have concerns about the construction of a tower so close to their homes and to Abraham Lincoln High School, which is located about half a mile away.
Ray Berns, who lives one block from the reservoir, is worried about the possible harmful effects from radiation coming from the panel antennae on the tower.
“This will affect not only the residents, but also the many recreational users of the reservoir area,” Berns said.
Flo Kimmerling, a board member of the Mid-Sunset Neighborhood Association and a long-time resident of the Sunset, acknowledges that science has yet to definitively prove a connection between any illness and exposure to the radiation emitted from mobile phone antennae.
“But that doesn’t mean it’s not harmful,” she said. “We all feel anxious about it and it gives us cause to worry.”
According to Alvin, Nextel is currently re-evaluating its need for a telecommunications tower at the Sunset Reservoir. If it is to be built, the company must first get a Conditional Use Permit from the SF Planning Commission. The hearing, which will be open to the public, is tentatively scheduled for June 8. If the Planning Commission grants the request, the plan could be brought before the SF Board of Supervisors, which would make a final decision on the project.
“The lease agreement between Nextel and the City is still under negotiation,” said Gary Dowd, director of the Public Utilities Commission’s Real Estate Services Department.
The City leases land for cellular sites for $3,500 a month, he said. The construction of telecommunication towers in residential areas has been controversial in many cities, including San Francisco.
Twin Peaks residents have been involved in a fierce on-going dispute with the private owners of Sutro Tower since 1998, when the Twin Peaks Improvement Association filed a lawsuit to block the addition of antennae to the tower. The construction of other towers has been blocked by neighborhood complaints in other areas.
In the Sunset, antennae have been stopped at a couple of locations, including on Noriega Street near St. Ignatius Preparatory High School.
“They were able to demonstrate that there was no need for a telecommunications tower in those areas,” said Michael Smith, a city planner at the SF Planning Department. Yet, since each cell phone carrier requires its own antennae for its own network, wireless antennae have been multiplying in residential neighborhoods. They can often be found hidden in places one would not expect, such as in church steeples and on the roofs of tall buildings.
RF radiation lies at the low energy end of the electromagnetic spectrum at frequencies between 3 kilohertz (kHz) and 300 megahertz (MHz). This lies directly between the slightly lower energy of FM radio waves and the slightly higher energy of microwaves.
Scientific research has so far provided inconclusive and conflicting results regarding the health hazards of RF radiation emitted from telecommunication towers, power lines and household appliances. Animal experiments studying the effects of RF radiation have yielded conflicting results that often cannot be repeated in other laboratories Epidemiology studies, which investigate the causes and distribution of diseases in a large group of people, have also not fully proved or disproved a definite link between RF radiation and cancer.
But since these studies were conducted for only a few years at a time, they cannot answer questions about long-term exposure. Many researchers who study the effects of RF radiation from mobile phones and towers believe that it is still too early to conclude whether or not they are harmful to humans.
Nextel issued a report in April 2006 to demonstrate that the proposed Sunset reservoir telecommunications tower will be in compliance with guidelines established by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The report states the maximum calculated level of RF energy at any nearby building, about 120 feet away, will be a few thousand times lower than the exposure limit determined by the FCC.
In order to reach the exposure limit, one would have to stand less than seven feet away from and directly in front of one of the panel antennae, located 50 feet above the ground. An area of 1,900 square feet surrounding the tower will be enclosed by a fence to prevent anyone from getting too close.
For questions regarding the proposed telecommunications tower, contact Alvin at (415) 341-8890. For questions regarding the planning process, contact Smith at (415) 558-6322.
Westside San Francisco 