Power line builders accused of ignoring community's needs

Alt Tv/Fleet FM Breakfast News Comment
Power line builders accused of ignoring community's needs
Architects of the electricity transmission lines straddling urban Auckland were accused at a hearing yesterday of an "amazing lack of foresight" at the expense of communities now living in their shadow. Manukau City transport manager Chris Freke said those who built the high-voltage overhead lines and pylons in the 1960s and preceding decades failed to make adequate provisions to compensate property owners enough to prevent homes from being built under them. "Transpower is in a difficult position because the people who put the lines in had an amazing lack of foresight and didn't protect property rights," he told a three-member board of inquiry into a Government proposal to enshrine the national importance of electricity transmission in council plans. Mr Freke said his council was concerned that a proposed national policy statement would reduce "what little regulatory tension" existed to require Transpower to address the effects of its transmission network on communities. Fascinating isn’t it – we have a spate of reports showing that growing up near power pylons have serious health side effects on children (and it’s always usually the poor who live beneath power lines which exacerbates health/poverty issues) and here we have Transpower about to have the ‘regulatory tension’ to protect those people being removed. We should force them to bury the cables along motorways and roads, but that would cost the precious mega companies too much money, and where would they find the money to play all those adverts by Jonah Lomu pretending to have a conscience about switching off the power for sick brown people and killing them?