Amy O’Hair- a Glen Park resident who has been documenting the strength of the powerful microwave pulses from ‘smart’ meters in San Francisco– was arrested this morning (Saturday 18-June-2011) for civil disobedience while trying to prevent installation of smart meters in her neighborhood. Though there have been a number of acts of civil disobedience in the Richmond, Marina, and other neighborhoods, this is the first actual arrest of an anti-“smart” meter protester in San Francisco to date. Amy joins a number of other women (including mothers and grandmothers) in Sonoma and Marin Counties who have been arrested over the past year blocking Wellington Energy smart meter installation trucks.
This morning, Ms. O’Hair sat on the hood of an installation truck and refused to move. The police were called and arrested her. She has been taken downtown and booked into County jail where she remains as of 2:30pm. We expect that she will be released later this afternoon around 4 or 5pm.
A bystander at the bus stop across the street cheered her support, and also confirmed in an interview afterwards that PG&E has been threatening herself and other residents with service disconnection for refusing the meters- a move that is not within their legal rights. PG&E has been under fire in recent days for threatening customers in Oakland with disconnection unless they allow the dangerous meters on their homes. “Though the company claims that the threats are isolated to a few renegade employees, there is growing evidence that this is part of a corporate strategy to isolate and intimidate people into accepting the increasingly unpopular dumb meters.” says Joshua Hart, Director of Stop Smart Meters! “PG&E seems to be claiming that they are more of an expert than the World Health Organization when it comes to deciding what is and what isn’t harmful to human health. Thousands of people have reported serious health damage. Enough is enough.”
Those opposed to the rollout insist that a monopoly energy company does not have the right to force a device onto people’s homes against their will- a device that emits high levels of radiation that the World Health Organization has linked to cancer (pdf press release).
If the California Public Utilities Commission is so corrupt it is incapable of protecting the public, then the public will have to protect themselves- risking arrest if necessary.
the lady at the bus stop is awesome!
She is a right gutsy lady,
She deserves a MEDAL for standing up to these now proving to be in many cases Neo Nazi bully boys of the truly not so smart dopey idiotic and now proving to be not only there, but here in Victoria Australia mounting numbers of Incendiary M/Wave Poisonous and Human and All Life Wrecking Microwave so-called but Satanic smart arsed meters.
My electric meter box is padlocked with an armour steel industrial padlock.
The C.E.O’s of most of these Electric Power Companies with few exceptions need to be Gaoled FOR LIFE, fair dinkum.
Brave woman. We are in her debt.
I just hope this isn’t what we will be doing in a couple of months. How frustrating is it going to be to watch someone put a Smart Meter on your home when you don’t want it? We need get going on this!
I have lots of data hidden deep in all the technical literature that indicates in terms of personal human body response to various frequencies and the power at those frequencies, we are all very different. This comes up in studies of neurology and brainwave mapping. So what a sensitive person can feel and have pain can be very different than another person. There are many reports of people that were not sensitive and later become sensitized. I thank this woman for doing what she has done, and I am ready to do something too. I see that Microsoft has just announced the human body antenna for controlling electronics, in reverse, the EMF controlling our bodies’ sensitivities and responses is not discussed. There is something wrong, very wrong with this one way picture. We are human body antennas each slightly different in shape, form, perception and sensitivity. Listen to the people that are in pain, they are the human body antennas and they are receiving loud and clear. STOP, the radiation. Now. See this article for microsofts’s use, just turn the article around and you should come to realize that we are taking it all in, even if the electrical engineers say that it is attenuated at the skin, they do not know about the effect of resonance and other biophysics that indicates our bodies do feel it in different ways and sensitivities. Antennas and propagation are very complex phenomena and depend on location , other things in the area and the sensitivity of the person and whether the person is grounded or not. If we know all that, how can we as a humane society refuse to listen to the people that are sensing and feeling the emission? It is like asking us to try to shut down our body so that we can survive in the world. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/cue/publications/chi2011_rfgestures_cohn.pdf http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37514/page1/
Obiously millionaire companies allways win, they will install the smart meters no matter what, do they really release radiation? after 50-100 years they will find out, in the mean time let’s make money with these “Smart Meters” if consumer uses little energy it will add more usage to the bill, if consumer uses a lot it will still add more usage to the bill anyways he will not notice. After all who knows the old type were stealing money too??
While she has every right to protest, and I applaud her for doing so, she may be a victim of false facts. Because this is an emotional issue, those who oppose smart meters and utilities in general are leveraging emotion. Unless, for example, they also oppose the use of cell phones and efficient operation of power supply networks.
The sad reality is that the implementation of smart meters by themselves cannot create the big brother network that is falsely promoted. Only through a combination of the elected class and bureaucrats acting in unison to “spy” might that happen. But, when you live a paranoid life……
Cell phone radiation, does not equal smart meter radiation which is on 24/7 and is pulsed, non-ionizing radiation causing the calcium ion to be knocked off of a body’s cells, allowing permeability and resulting in illness.
Smart meters provide information about what occupants are doing in their home 24/7. To me, this IS Big Brother. It’s nobody’s business what I do in the privacy of my own home nor when I do it. Since smart meters can be hacked, that info could fall into anybody’s hand. The utility company could sell it to any number of people who want it–law enforcement, insurance companies, marketeers, etc. This is invasion of privacy.
I applaud Amy for her courage and willingness to fight save her family and neighbors from the dangers of smart meters. Those of us who are also trying to prevent smart meters from being installed on our homes and in our neighborhoods can be inspired by her actions. Just because “big business” is bigger than we are, it doesn’t mean we can’t put up a fight to oppose the usurping of our rights to health, privacy and safety. Some communities have succeeded in stopping smart meters by loud and constant protest. If we band together, we can do the same.