I got a friendly letter this week from the local power company stating that we are the chosen ones. We have the honor of hosting a brand new set of 161KV power lines across our property. This, to say the least, was quite a surprise. I did a quick search of the forum to see if anyone else has this issue and noticed that some of you have the high voltage lines in the vicinity of your ponds or houses.

I am wondering if there are any suggestions, issues that we need to be aware of as they come marching through. I'm sure this is bad karma. My job several years ago was to help establish government radar sites and deal with the negotiations on impacted landowners. What goes around comes around, right?

I know I will be hosting the wires for the greater good, just wondering if there are any tips out there. BTW, have you noticed that aluminum foil is getting pretty expensive?

PB

I realize this isn't really related, but the Gov't ran a Highway thru my Pop's place years ago and paid such a good price, I remember him saying..."I wish they bought it all". It hasn't really been an inconveniece, and we have easy access. Then another company wanted an easement to run pipeline, that worked well too, but it was underground and remains the best area for hunting food plots. He did however turn down a sweet deal for a satellite tower...but that was due to my Mom and the concern about neighbors.

Catmandoo has lines very close to his pond, he can help with advice...he can tell you if flourecent lights really work without being connected!

If the lines are somewhat out of the way, enjoy the $$$, keep the cut trees for BBQ's, and accept this as progress. If you don't like it, there's a plot of land just down the road that looks fantastic! (lol, I'm not attached to my land, I'm attached to wildlife and water)

How big the land? and does it have a pond on it? and where!!???!!

I have what I've been told are 500KV lines, running through my property. The run right over my pond.



I'd rather they weren't there, but there are some good points to them. Under certain conditions, the metal roof on our home hums. It sounds like a big bulldozer idling off in the distance. They do make constant arcing and snapping noise, but after a while, the noise just gets tuned out. As Eastland said, I can light a 4-foot fluorescent lamp by just holding it, and standing under the lines. My fly reel arcs inside when I reel it, and I can pull half-inch sparks off the eyes of my flyrod and my 12-foot jigging rod.

The good points are that I have this 300-foot wide strip on one edge of my property that must stay cleaned out. The power company comes along ever few years and sprays poison to kill the brush and trees on properties that aren't maintained. But, I keep mine bushogged -- about 5 acres of right-of-way. I usually just bushhog each August, as it is a wildlife sanctuary the rest of the time. It is a great place for wildlife. It runs between two heavily forested areas. I keep it mostly in grass -- except where my pond is located, my berry patches, my garden, my wood piles, and my chicken yard. At one time or another, the power line right-of-way has allowed us to view nearly every type of critter that lives in West Virginia.



I feel it is tolerable. My fish are happy.

Ken

Just be careful in damp or foggy weather.

All kidding aside, I have a high line cutting across the corner of my 10a plot, and have no problems with it. The voltage may not be quite as high as yours, but it does make zapping sound in damp weather.

Ken,

Is that really true about the florescent light?

lol, Cecil is thinking about feeding his fish with a no cost flourecent light zapper...if only the power company comes thru

Thanks for the reassurance. We were planning to build our house next year, but are planning to wait and see what the lines end up to be.

Our land is approx 10 acres. Roughly 330' by 1300'. The Easement request is for about 2.25 acres, 70' by 1300' along the south side of the property. I just finished the pond (appx 1 acre centered to one end) last year that was to be in the back yard of the house. The proposed lines will cross the dam on their way past. By my calculations, because of the narrow width of our land, anywhere I would put a house I will be less than 150' from the easement and less than 200ft from the overhead lines.

I'm still trying to come up with a reasonable estimate of the impact so I negotiate with the power company. My better half was very upset about the view of lines from the house locations. I'm gonna have to hire an appraiser to see if they can come up with any financial impacts. I don't know about building a new house so close to those lines.

They would be a large as those you show Catmandoo. They tell me 100' metal poles about 600' apart, so I will end up with 2 or 3 of them.

PB

Is the compensation package offered by the power transmission company substantial?....just curious.
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We debated similar impact with another thread a year or two ago when someone was approached with a wind farm proposal. Personally, I take issue with the visually impact of power lines, train tracks, wind turbines, etc. When we were searching for our LNP project, non-existance of these aesthetic negatives was critical. I feel real bad for ya, Pond Bob. I could not go into a new project, expecting to construct my dream property, knowing that it just got compromised before we barely lifted a dozer blade. Yep, I'm selfish like that.
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Only my opinion.

Yes. Maybe I can get my wife to come out with a camera after dark and get a picture of me holding one.

This is not real uncommon. Any strong field will ionize the gases in the bulb.

When I was a teenager, we moved from the farm into a small "corner store." At that time, and to this day, I have an amateur radio license. If I was "on the air" when my parents closed the store, the fluorescent lights would stay dimly lit from the Radio Frequency energy field.

That gave me and another teenage ham fool a great idea. One summer night we took a couple old bulbs from the basement of the store. He lived on a very wooded lot next to a business district. We setup an antenna and ham station in his backyard. We taped the bulbs to our antenna feedline. We got on the air using Morse code. Everytime the key was down, the bulbs would light.

It caused quite a stir. There were reports of UFOs phoned into the police. The police -- my dad's cousin -- was sent to investigate. He made us take the bulbs down.

Thanks Uncle Fester, I mean catmandoo.

Brettski - still in negotiations with the power company. Their first offer is about 25% of the value of the 2 acres. I keep asking them about the drop in value of the other 8 acres. I also offered to sell them the whole parcel outright, but they didn't want that. So I'm still trying to figure the fair market impact of the loss of use of nearly 25% of our property and the limited use of rest of it. The remaining 8 acres will be very difficult to develop for a house without a clear view of the lines and poles out the front or back.

My wife is very particular about the view and neither of us want to spend our twilight years looking at wires and listening to the popping and crackling. (It probably won't be as bad as that, but while in negotiations I have to keep up the 'woe is me' attitude) Free lighting could be nice side benefit if there was a way to harness it.

I'm sure we will work thru it. The pond is still doing great and staying full. So much rain in the KC area, it went over the emergency spillway a couple of times, but the grass I started late last summer seems to be holding well so no worries of breaching.

PB

I have transmission lines across my land and there are several considerations.

Good deer hunting spot is one. On the flip side of that, they came in a couple of years ago and replaced a lot of the poles during deer season.

I am currently trying to sell one place and an investor told me that it would kill a deal. He wouldn't touch it. Heck, it doesn't bother me.

In a Ranch Management class, a wire rep showed up to talk to us about fencing. The part that I have retained is him saying to never run a barbed wire fence closely parallel to an electrical transmission line. You might light up like one of Kens bulbs.

I have high-tension/woven wire fence almost in parallel with the power lines crossing the back corner of my property. Now, in addition to taking a florescent tube back there, I'll have to take my multimeter along and see if the fence is hot.

Pond Bob, I am not an attorney and the following suggestions might be totally absurd from a legal standpoint. These are only my impressions. If a utility company or a pipeline company wants a right of way, negotiating with you seems to be simply a formality. They can and will simply take it, compensating you for the fair market value at the time of the taking. If you can retain the right to cross their right of way in future development of your property with utilities, etc., consider yourself fortunate. Try to retain every right possible in the enjoyment and future development of your property without your being responsible for improving or protecting the utility or pipeline. Try to have your enjoyment of your property become the primary concern. ABSOLUTELY, CONSULT AN ATTORNEY!!

Good advice Dudley !

I gave him the advice I thought you might but couldn't, Eric. You probably had your wife handcuff you to prevent your response. As we both know, an attempt to negotiate after the taking will probably result in the property remaining as it is for the next five hundred years, or longer.

Those type situations can be very difficult and often they could care less what the owner wants . One thing they don't want is to have the project slowed down and that is the only leverage. Sometimes an attorney can help in that respect.

I don't want to be negative but I read somwhere that these power lines could be linked to rare forms of leukemia if you live under them or spend too much time under them. It may just be a coincidence but my father-in-law lived next to a power transformer station and died of a rare form or leukemia.

No, just wanted to see if Ken was pulling my leg. In his part of the country telling tall tales is quite common. My sister lives in southeastern Kentucky so I should know.

When laying pipelines parallel to high power lines, we had to ground them ever so many feet to keep induced current from accumulating on the pipe. Welder have been fatally shocked when welding on lines that were not grounded. So don't lay any pipelines along the right away without grounding.

I've heard of schemes to bury large coils of wire under a high line to filch free electricity. If you get the number of coils right, you can get lots of usable current. I have also heard the power companies are very vigilant about that, and prosecute aggressively.

Thanks, Dudley, I have contacted a local attorney who has dealt with this kind of thing before. They are of the same mind, that the power company will get what they need to do their thing, and I may be able to maximize what I am compensated, but they will only go so far.

The nice thing about this site is having all of you to bounce questions and ideas off of. Many are very good ideas I hadn't thought of, and others are intriguing, if not dangerous. The thought of a lifetime of free electricity is good, but I'd probably get the same in Leavenworth, along with meals and a nifty set of clothes.

I am now working with a local appraiser who has done some work on these kinds of cases, just to see if there is anything I can use to convince the power folks of negative impact to the value of the property and our personal loss of use as a home.

Thanks to all of you for responding..

PB

Before we bought this place, I did a lot of research. I was unable to find any credible links to health issues. In my younger days I was closely associated with the health effects of Radio Frequency electric and magnetic fields on various parts of the body. I worked in a slightly different area that studied and fixed the effects of strong electromagnetic fields, but for a number of years I was in many meetings per month that co-discussed the subject of health effects. And, there are many. Our bodies, and all organs in our bodies have resonances that are directly affected by electromagnetic fields. WWII aircraft Radar and cataracts is just one example. Today, heart arrhythmias are repaired using radio signals to burn out nodes within the heart that cause anomalies.

From everything I've been able to find, the levels at 60 Hz must be magnitudes higher in microTesla's than we are exposed to, to have health effects. We would need significant exposure to levels like those found in MRI machines.



No leg pulling here. Last night I tried to get pictures of me holding a compact fluorescent and a normal 4-foot fluorescent bulb. Unfortunately, they all turned out like the photos they show on the TV shows about Out of Body Experiences and ghosts roaming the bedrooms of haunted houses.

The bulbs do not illuminate at full brightness by any means, but they do definitely illuminate. They would not be bright enough to build a bug zapper.

As for fences, my garden is real close to one of the towers, and directly below the lines. The garden fence is approximately 30 x 60, and fully insulated for an electric charger. It is four lines of standard electric fence wire. It does not seem to gather any kind of a charge. For some reason, the zappiest thing I've got is my flyrod, with my jigging rod coming in second.

Maybe late next winter, or early spring, when things are really slow, we could have a big "GET BUZZED" party under my power lines. Everybody bring a fish or two, I'll do the cooking and provide the rest.

Regards,
Ken

Smart move, Pond Bob! Sure helps to have an attorney on your side. We have a twenty five year old $60,000 water line with a thirty foot gap in it. The line ends on the north side of a pipeline right of way and begins again at the south right of way marker. We thought our engineer had permission to cross the right of way but he didn't, having never had a problem in the past. The company's position was that developing the property would result in a population increase which would require an upgrade of the pipeline. We would have had to pay for the upgrade. The forty acres is still a pasture, and not one drop of water has ever flowed through the water line. I know, I know, but the engineer was our cousin, a great friend and a fine gentleman, and we would never ever consider trying to recover in that way.

Pond Bob, here are a few pics of my attempt to make the best of the same kind of power line through my farm. Some before and after. If you look hard enough you can see the tower or lines in every picture. I don't mind the lines. I guess its how you grow up. My best childhood memories are of roaming the ridges of a power line right of way in northeast MS. coon hunting, deer hunting, rabbit hunting, quail hunting, Indian arrowhead hunting. Then my cousin and I took our 22 rifles and tried to shoot the metal towers from one ridge to the other. Teenage boys will do some crazy things.

The humming sound does not bother me, because the traffic and city noise in town where I live is a lot louder and bothersome. But then again, I am the kind of guy that likes the sound of a train occasionally rolling on down the tracks in the country. I grew up hearing that as a boy too, putting pennies on the track, and an occasional theft of some good scrap iron. Later I found that the rabbits and quail seemed to like the overgrowth along the tracks too. Me and my beagle almost got run over by a train while rabbit hunting once along the track. Trains don't usually sound a horn for hunters before rounding corners in the sticks.

Long winded. But a point somewhere. Maybe, when life throws you power lines, you might consider going hunting.

Now a shameless excuse to show pics of my pond.