Cell-towers, Environmental Impact, Solution

I

imp

Senior Member
Early on, as cell towers were popping up all over, a lot of consternation was expressed regarding their scenic impact. My nephew while vising us, he being a retired telephone company Engineer, spied this one in the distance. Today I finally went over for a closer look:



This tower is disguised as a palm tree! Intentionally, no easy feat. The "fronds" appear to be metallic, maybe, and move just enough with the wind to be convincing. It's located on the property of a non-denominational church. Their involvement in this "tree's" implementation is unknown.

Has anyone spotted anything like this during your travels? imp
 
I don't know how safe modern cell towers are, but
years ago there were reports that these towers were
dangerous for our health.
True or false I am not sure, maybe it was media hype,
but who knows?

Many were disguised as street name signs in the cities,
they are not around these days and nobody seems to
care about them anymore.

Have you heard of this?

Mike.
 
Older Towers?

Mike said:
I don't know how safe modern cell towers are, but
years ago there were reports that these towers were
dangerous for our health.
True or false I am not sure, maybe it was media hype,
but who knows?

Many were disguised as street name signs in the cities,
they are not around these days and nobody seems to
care about them anymore.

Have you heard of this?

Mike.
Click to expand...

I have not. I should think that street signs being necessarily low to the ground, would have limited range usefulness. The old Bell Telephone Companies, failing to view future predictions seriously, built an enormously expensive system of long-distance telephone communication towers commonly referred to as "microwave" towers. Within only a few years, that system was generally obsoleted by fiber-optics, buried alongside the nation's highways. Many advantages: not prone to atmospheric disturbance or damage (wind, hail, etc), not easily amenable to sabotage, enormous signal capacity. I think, but know not for sure, that some portion of the old microwave system may be in current cellphone use. imp
 
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Jim, that's quite interesting! I have not seen one elsewhere, but then, I haven't travelled the Southwest much in recent years. The palm tree design would not "fly" to well in the cold parts of the country! imp
 
My son leases a small piece of his land to Verizon and Sprint (it is a two-carrier cell tower) and receives a really nice piece of change for doing nothing, except to keep the weeds and grass trimmed around the small fence that surrounds it. He was able to negotiate his own rate. The company makes an offer and then the land owner goes from there with negotiations, unless he is just inclined to accept whatever the companies offer. There are actual cell phone tower negotiators.
 
I have seen a number of them in Arizona and there is one up the street from us that looks like an ordinary tree.

There is no spanish moss on it though.
 
Manatee said:
I have seen a number of them in Arizona and there is one up the street from us that looks like an ordinary tree.

There is no spanish moss on it though.
Click to expand...

You are located in AZ? Profile: Sunshine State. All the Southwest States are "sunshine states", I suppose. imp
 
This is all very interesting, my son told me a few weeks ago that he had been approached about putting a tower on his land, but nothing defiant yet, I doubt that he knows about the negotiators. I used to work for an Engineering company that did design work for rural telephone companies, I've been retired 12 years and this is all new to me.
 
I've only seen them on the 'Net, but it seems there are more than a few.

Something similarly clever they did in CA with oil wells in the middle of the city:

oil_well_ca.jpg
 
We used to know a guy who had a bait and tackle store. He got paid $1,000 a month for letting them put a tower at the edge of his parking lot in space that wasn't being used anyway.
 
Manatee said:
We used to know a guy who had a bait and tackle store. He got paid $1,000 a month for letting them put a tower at the edge of his parking lot in space that wasn't being used anyway.
Click to expand...

Geez! Not bad income for unused ground! BTW, do you prefer FL to AZ? I'm scared to death of those Palmetto Beetles! Had plenty of them in Phoenix, but there they werer plain, old, HUGE cockroaches! imp
 
Down here and other places wind turbines are numerous..I have heard that the ones that let them on their land had to move away because they did not realize the wooshing noise that they made!!

As far as towers and health concerns, I believe it was the electric power towers that caused health problems.
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th.jpg
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High-tension transmission lines like you show above have been thought to cause health problems due to the intense magnetic field constantly being generated by them. The field
reaches out in all directions, and passes easily through non-metallic stuff, like human bodies. The strength of those fields decreases rapidly as one gets farther and farther away from the line. No proof has been shown of claims that constant exposure to magnetic fields contributes to causing brain cancer. Which brings up a more serious concern:

Cell phones generate magnetic fields of their own, and the distance from the body is small: we stick them right up against our heads! Maybe the most risky are those things some folks walk around with, stuck in their ears. IF there is risk. no one is certain. Not long before his death, Albert Einstein was quoted as saying if Science continues on it's present course, the world will in several generations be filled with idiots.

Prescient? imp
 
imp said:
Early on, as cell towers were popping up all over, a lot of consternation was expressed regarding their scenic impact. My nephew while vising us, he being a retired telephone company Engineer, spied this one in the distance. Today I finally went over for a closer look:



This tower is disguised as a palm tree! Intentionally, no easy feat. The "fronds" appear to be metallic, maybe, and move just enough with the wind to be convincing. It's located on the property of a non-denominational church. Their involvement in this "tree's" implementation is unknown.

Has anyone spotted anything like this during your travels? imp
Click to expand...

I'm sure the church collects s nice monthly fee from from the cell tower folks.
 
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