Mast Meeting

Wednesday was the evening of the meeting quickly organised by a new group in town - Stop the Hay Mast! The Parish Hall was almost full, and the meeting started with an announcement that the meeting would be filmed for Hay TV, to give anyone who didn't want to be on film a chance to say so. Everybody was quite happy to continue. There are a couple of films about the mobile phone mast on Hay TV at the moment, and the meeting should be up there shortly.

The mast was also discussed at Monday's Council meeting, with the town councillors being quite unhappy about the way the issue had been handled. This is becoming something of a regular feature of town council meetings - they ask for information, or object to something, or remind the County Council that something is supposed to happen, and there's a deathly silence from the County Council. In this case it was the planning application for the O2 phone mast, which the town council objected to "in the strongest possible terms". This meant that it had to go to the planning committee for discussion - where only Gareth Ratcliffe opposed the application, and the concerns of the town council were ignored.

Several of the town councillors had health concerns about the positioning of the mast - it's going to be behind the industrial units on Forest Road, only about 300 metres from the school, and even closer to the medical centre. If the school is moved to a new site by the medical centre, and a new community centre built there, and the care home that is planned, they will all be much closer to the mobile phone mast.
I really didn't know whether there were health problems connected to mobile phone masts, but several people at the meeting on Wednesday had done some research, and the first part of the meeting was taken up with a short film (at least, the first part of a longer film) in which a Professor from Canada, Dr Magda Havas, was speaking at a meeting to oppose a mobile phone mast on top of a fire station somewhere in Canada. She's been doing research into the effects of the electromagnetic radiation from the masts for years, and talked about real, demonstrable health effects from prolonged exposure to the radiation from the masts. She also pointed out that we surround ourselves with electrical equipment all the time, in our homes and work, and all the places that provide wifi, and all of this has a cumulative effect on the human body.

On Saturday, Ellie Spencer and Fiona Howard (and I think someone else) were interviewed by BBC Radio Hereford and Worcester, and the way that the interviews were cut to go on air made it seem as if the people of Hay were Luddites who didn't want to be part of the 21st century. They were very annoyed with the way the reporters twisted the quotes to make it seem as if the people interviewed were against the Hay Festival. Apparently, Peter Florence was also interviewed, and he'd heard nothing about it, though there's been some Twittering going on about the need for a better signal locally.
I had no idea about this, not having a mobile phone myself, but Hay Festival erect a temporary phone mast over the two weeks of the Festival for the Festival goers.
At the moment, Orange and Vodaphone share space on the Clyro mast, which is a lot higher up a hill, and away from local residents. One of the options for an O2 mast was to share the Clyro mast, but this was rejected as being too far away. They also looked at land further up the hill behind Forest Road, but the farmers up there refused permission to build. They also looked at various industrial units nearby, which were on ground that was deemed to be too low. So they settled on the ground behind the industrial units on Forest Road, which is a bit elevated (the mast will be twelve and a half metres tall).
One lady at the Wednesday meeting said that she lived right by the site chosen, and had heard nothing about the mast until the other week - planning permission was given in March, and there was a notice in the B&R on two weeks in the middle of December. She said she had seen the little notice pinned to a post beside the site, but it had been very confusing and she hadn't realised what it meant. She was worried about the health of her children, and several parents at Hay School are also worried enough to be talking about moving their children to another school according to the man who went to talk to parents at the school gate the other day to gather opinions.

There are several problems here. One is that planning permission has already been granted, and would be extremely difficult to overturn. Another relates to the health concerns - the National Parks committee did not consider the health concerns put forward by the Town Council because O2 had signed a declaration that the electromagnetic radiation was within safe limits. The problem here is that the ICNIRP guidelines for safe limits were laid out in 1999, well before the present generation of mobile phones, and related only to the heat put out by the radiation, and nothing about other possible health risks. Since 1999, there has been a lot more research done, and WHO has classified the radiation from mobile phone masts as a "possible carcinogen" - in other words, it is possibly linked to an increased cancer risk. Hay already has high radon levels naturally, which can lead to cancer, and there is a cluster of cases of brain tumours in the area. Rob Golesworthy, the Deputy Mayor, said that two members of his family have suffered from brain tumours and this is why he is opposed to the mast.
And if that weren't enough, mobile phone radiation can threaten bee populations by messing up their navigational abilities and lowering their immune systems - and the loss of bees, which are essential to the pollination of crops, is a growing problem in itself.

So what can be done? One man at the meeting on Wednesday suggested that legal challenges were not going to succeed - international companies like O2 have already considered all the angles there, and it would also be extremely expensive. He said that what companies like O2 really don't like is bad publicity, and that one of the most effective means of embarrassing them would be to go onto their Facebook page and leave a comment (nothing abusive, obviously - that would only result in the commenter being blocked).
Apart from that, Roger Williams, MP was at most of the meeting - he had to leave early - and he is on the Science and Technology Committee in the House of Commons, with a special interest in the perception of risk. There was applause when he said "there must be a better place" to put the mast. He suggested that contacting an ombudsman would be better than a judicial review of the planning application.

Other people who would be worth writing to with comments about the mast would be Kirsty Williams, AM, Jill Evans the MEP, Stephen Rogers the Head of School Services at Powys County Council, Tamsin Law the Chief Planning Officer at the County Council, Dr Sumina Azam, the Interim Director of Public Health at Bronllys Hospital, Rosi Edwards of the Health and Safety Executive for Wales, and Keith Towler the Children's Commissioner for Wales.