San Diego Housing Bubble News and Analysis

1. Fire hazard: some homes too close to power lines might be in a fire hazard/brush fire zone. Translation: harder to get insurance, or insurance more expensive. I know a few folks that live in Sea Ridge in Carmel Valley had some insurance companies that gave them crap about it. Though I do not think it's not directly related to the power lines, they are facing an area which has dry brush and power lines. And they don't mix.

2. There has been speculation between EMF from power lines and leukemia, though nothing conclusive. Not sure what would be worse: power lines 30-40 feet above you, or power lines buried 7 feet underneath you (as is the case for lots of torrey hills).

3. Power lines crackling you sometimes hear when the it's damp outside.

4. Hope you don't plan on putting in a pool. Water and power lines don't mix.

5. While you might not mind the power lines, there are plenty of people that do. Translation: consider if you ever needed to sell your home.

Personally, I would never buy a home near power lines for personal use, not matter what sort of price discount I could get. It would be along the same thing as buying a home near an airport and then complain about the safety/noise level(Oops, I didn't say that.)

Power lines are a major impediment when re-selling so if you dont mind them make sure you get a substantial discount (at least $25K).

As for the EMF nonsense, here's my take on that. If they are dangerous, how come every lineman that works on those things every day isnt dead within a year?

Because any (if any) health impacts would be something that is longer term, and not something that would be evident until most likely long after the linesman has retired or left the job. And it's probably not possible to attribute cancer to the root cause of it in hindsight.

One of the official answers are "no increased risks, with one exception" http://dceg.cancer.gov/reb/research/noni...

More detailed info here:
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/facts...

It's one of those "unknown", just like there has not been an conclusive evidence that says one way or the other that yapping on a cell phone does/doesn't not have health consequences. Because we won't know the long term affects of this until some of us 20-30 years get older. Official answer right now is there is no increased risks also.

Linemen have been working those lines for decades so the long term effects would already have bourne themselves out. If there was a statistically significant higher risk I'd think there would be some study showing that.

Children usually don't start out working as linesman though. I think the study was done that this is more of a concern of children/infant population. Again, indications that there are no conclusive evidence that indicate a direct link. But, some of studies are all over the map, some say yes, some say no.

Officially, there is no conclusive evidence to say it leads to anything, so I guess as a home, it's not needed as a disclosure, though it's kinda hard for a buyer to not notice it anyway, i would think.

Whatever the impact, they are big and scary looking. You wouldnt find them in my backyard.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting there is an impact. I'm just pointing out there are people on the both side of the fence on whether there is any health impacts.

My personal decision is simple: why take a chance if you can simply avoid the situation? I mean, it can't be *good* for one's health to be near living right underneath power lines.

OK, on this thread, I will use my ration of one-piggington-comment-per-month.

A true story:

An engineering school classmate of mine interned at a large power distribution company. Her internship involved safety issues of high-power lines, so she had top secret access to the locked vault of in-house studies this power company had conducted on health effects of high power lines on various farm animals and humans living under the lines

She said that data was the scariest thing she's ever seen. These are the details I can recall she told from seeing the data first hand:

1) The dangerous lines are the Extra High Voltage and Ultra High Voltage: essentially anything 230kV and above. The data showed the health risk to life forms near the lines due to RF energy went up with the voltage. This link merely explains the different voltage levels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overhead_po...
2) She explained that developing fetuses in farm animals living under the 230kv and higher lines showed particularly bad health effects. Weird stuff: aborted fetuses, birth defects...etc. Also farmers saw weird effects on milk production, stuff like that.

She suggested that some data on humans living under the wires was very bad, but was kept secret, conspiracy stuff. She saw the data firsthand. She didn't want to talk about the details of that data.

CONCLUSION: don't buy a home under any high power lines, in particular stay blocks or miles away from 230kV and above lines.

stockstradr: She was privy to Top Secret company data as an intern? Really?

The kind of data that if made public would be incriminating to the company and potentially cost them millions of dollars? And she was involved with this as an intern?

Wow. That really beggars description. Did she tell anyone? Report it to the government? Tell an investigative journalist? One would think her ethics and morality would kick in at some point, especially if life safety was an issue. Right? Or is it just me?

old BMIT fans will remember this fun little blast from the past:

talk about power lines

1112 Lavendar Way, Corona, CA 92882
--5 bed/3 bath/4,406 sqft.
--10/2006: purchased for $810,500.
--04/2007: listed on MLS for $859,900. "Beautiful executive home, brand new ready to move-in, over 100k in upgrades, gourmet kitchen with granite, stainless steel appliances, cherry wood cabinets, vaulted ceilings, wrought iron staircase, can lights, arched doors, crown moldings, upgraded carpet and flooring, one bedroom and bath down with it's own entrance, office w/french doors & morning room. See to believe!"

withdrawn from market, somehow never found a buyer...

Two places with a heavy presence of power towers:

SEH (Old Glen off questhaven has them in above the backyards and some people in early 2007 were not only asking low 600s for those places, but taking pictures from the street for the MLS with a Tower behind the house). They run down the past Glen Ellen Place. Here is an image from the current listing on Glen Ellen:

http://tempo5.sandicor.com/SNDImages/207/080083407_A01_14.jpg

The community below SEH (Old Creek Ranch?). The towers run right through the middle of that community. http://tempo5.sandicor.com/SNDImages/31/...

I found a listing about a month ago in Carlsbad and one of the MLS images was of the backyard, showing off the view. To the right of the home just over the fence was the top of a power tower. It was probably 10 feet from the fence, a child could toss a tennis ball and hit it.

It amazes me that someone would build so close to these towers. If one could look past the potential dangers (as noted above, it can be argued both safe and dangerous although im in the dangerous court), these things are eyesoars.

You could probably just lay light bulbs on the counter in that Corona house and they would light up. No need to screw them into sockets.

Linemen don't work on energized lines unless it is absolutely necessary. The real guinea pigs are the people that sleep and live under them.
The bottom is near/hear if inventory is low and buyers are even looking at "dog" properties.

Awesome http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zGnfL_Cc7M

Don't forget the SDGE switching station in Torrey Hills in Carmel Valley, as well as the petroleum and natural gas pipelines that run around their too.

stockstradr: She was privy to Top Secret company data as an intern? Really?

I was an engineering intern myself at Motorola (back in 1993 when it was actually a successful company)

I was amazed at the confidential information I had access to. As for the power line data, I believed that friend of mine when she told that story; she was a straight-up honest chick, also a 4.0 GPA student.

How is that possible? To get access to top secret information, that would have required a security clearance, which for an intern would have been impossible to get, considering a security clearance requires extensive background check that often takes months. An internship would have been over before the background check is completed. I know because specifically I was an intern at motorola and defense companies, and the company mistakenly started the process of applying for a security clearance for me when I started, and cancelled it about 6 weeks later after they realized I was an intern.

Side note: other things I learned early on was Motorola and defense companies were not going to be my thing (when a company spends money on a museum about itself and hires FTE's to run it, you know the company was wasting money. if you were a mot intern, you know exactly what I was talking about). Not to mention working Arlington Heights and Schamleberg(sp) blows.

FLU: My old man was an aerospace engineer for Ford Aerospace in Palo Alto back in the early 1970s through the late 1980s (when he retired).

He worked on the Intelsat and Milsat (intelligence and military satellites, like the KH-11 Vulture) programs and had Top Secret clearance. He had worked on the F4 Phantom avionics program in El Segundo prior to that, where he also had a Top Secret clearance.

There was an instance when a Top Secret document was misplaced and they locked his building down for a day and a half, trying to find it. They even called in a USAF investigator following, and went through a rigorous teardown of existing procedures to make sure it didn't happen again.

I grew up in the Bay Area during a period when defense companies like Lockheed, Ford Aerospace and the NAS Moffett/NASA Ames complex employed a lot of people, many of whom had Top Secret clearances. I also remember the fact that most of those folks did NOT discuss the projects or programs they were working on, simply because the risks were too high and you never knew who was listening (like when they discovered a Polish government spy posing as a janitor at Western Digital out in Sunnyvale).

The idea that some intern is running around with access to Top Secret data is hooey. Pure and simple.

Putting everything else aside, my guess on the "large power distribution company" having "Top Secret" documents is that they internally marked the documents as "Top Secret." The clearances being discussed in this thread relate to government security clearances which I doubt are relevant to the company. The company probably just bought a rubber stamp to mark documents that they didn't want out as "Top Secret."

Actually, my dad (retired) was a defense engineer. So i never knew what he worked on. He told me jokingly that he could tell me but then he would have to kill me. So like I said, it was quite a rigorous process to getting a security clearance, not to mention expensive. I think he followed the defense trend from Texas, to Sunnyvale, to LA.

That said, stupid stuff does happen. Read about the "Falcon and the Snowman". True story.

Anyway, given all the crap some chinese dude got at Los Almos Labs for suspected treason, and the general stuff my dad said about being taiwanese and growing tensions with china and us even early on, I took the rare occasion of listening to him and decided never to work for a defense company. evar.

Well, then that really isn't top secret. That would be company confidential or company secret. Which, an in case, talking about it outside the company breeched his/her code of conduct. not to mention if the evidence was so damning to the company, and with dire consequence, why oh why wasn't the whistle blown on this?

"Well, then that really isn't top secret. That would be company confidential or company secret. Which, an in case, talking about it outside the company breeched his/her code of conduct. not to mention if the evidence was so damning to the company, and with dire consequence, why oh why wasn't the whistle blown on this?"

Flu: Exactly my point earlier.

The post about top secret says specifically it was "in house" studies from the power distribution company. So this isn't a DOD top secret.

Private sector rarely follows the governments prefered terminology. I've worked for a defense contractor and in private sector - both have used the term "top secret". The difference is the defense contractor prefaced it with "DOD" or "Government".

As far as the power lines- it reduces the resale potential - so that should be enough of a discouraging factor. If I wanted to be ultimately paranoid I'd say it matters a lot. I lived under power lines in Clairemont till I was 4. My parents bought the house a year before I was born. (The ones that are just east of Mt. Everest, south of Balboa). Who knows if this is/was a factor in the fact that 3 of my 4 immediate family members have died of cancer in the past 5 years. Parents and older brother. Probably not related... but who knows for sure.

that is enough for me to not buy near powerlines!

I look back and this thread has de-volved into debates about security classifications at DoD vs. private sector?

You gotta be kidding.

And THAT reminds me, I am have now exceeded my self-imposed ration of ONE post per month to this ridiculous blog site.

Time to ignore this web site for at least another 30-days.

But Stockstrader, for the month of january , to be precise, you have already exceeded the 1 month ration for some time.

http://piggington.com/user/2241/track

:)

Sorry, engineers tend to be precise. See you next month though :)