Suit Claims Cancer Link to Power Lines

A couple who believe their 4-year-old daughter got two types of cancer from electromagnetic fields caused by power lines next to their home filed suit Wednesday against San Diego Gas & Electric in what their attorneys call a precedent-setting case.

Ted Zuidema, 32, and his wife, Michelle, 29, lived in a small home in Serra Mesa, near San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, from February, 1985, until February, 1990. Their daughter, Mallory, who was born in 1987, is now a victim of two rare types of kidney cancer.

In a suit filed in Superior Court, the couple allege that unusually high levels of electromagnetic radiation caused the cancers--nephroblastomatosis and Wilm’s tumor--during the time that Michelle Zuidema was pregnant with Mallory.

Mallory’s mother said Wednesday that she was “nervous” about taking on a company willing to spend millions to defend itself.

“This is my child,” she said tearfully, standing on the sidewalk in front of her former home, in the 9300 block of Broadview Avenue. “I don’t know how many of you are mothers, but you know what it feels like when your child is threatened.

“I’ll be damned if I’m going to let anybody stand in my way of having what’s right done. This is terrible, and people need to know that, in instances like this, where there’s such a danger, it just shouldn’t exist. It’s wrong.

“Yes, I’m more than a little nervous, but it means too much to us.”

Michael Withey, a Seattle-based attorney and one of three handling the Zuidema’s case, said the couple would not be seeking punitive, only compensatory, damages. He said “no dollar figure” had been established or requested.

“That’s up to the jury to decide,” he said.

Withey called the case “one of the first in the country” to charge that “power lines in a residential area, particularly these, which were very close to the Zuidema’s house, caused childhood cancer.

“Studies have shown for many years that power lines near houses that cause electromagnetic fields contribute to childhood and fetal cancers,” he said. “That’s what we’re claiming in this case, that these lines next to the Zuidema’s house were the cause of Wilm’s tumor and nephroblastomatosis in Mallory.”

Withey said the confluence of a high-voltage power line next to a telephone pole that acted as “a distribution line, not a feeder line” and was perched 12 feet from the Zuidemas’ roof, with a line from a “step-down” transformer running directly into the house, triggered toxic levels of electromagnetic radiation.

“SDG&E; knew for many years that there were potential health hazards from electromagnetic radiation,” Withey said. “Yet, they didn’t warn anybody, and in this case didn’t reroute the line so that it didn’t go so close to the house.

“There is a right of way farther down they could have used. But they also should have warned these people of the electromagnetic fields they’d created, because they knew full well that there was scientific literature to support that.”

Without commenting on specifics of the case, John Britton, a spokesman for SDG&E;, and John Dawsey, the company’s senior environmental analyst, alluded to disagreement among scientists about electromagnetic radiation.

“We will continue to be our open, pro-active self on all issues affecting the company and the company’s customers,” Britton said. “The bottom line is, what we have here is scientific uncertainty. That’s the issue. Nobody really knows the situation with electromagnetic fields.

“Some people cite all this danger, but experts say they’re placing themselves ahead of the research. Nevertheless, we have here an EMF (testing) center. We’ll go out and do free readings for any homeowner.”

Britton continued, “What we can’t do is interpret the readings. We can measure a magnetic field, but we can’t explain what the numbers mean, or is it dangerous, or is it safe?”

Ted Zuidema said that testing of the home’s electromagnetic fields by ERC International, a private company in San Diego, “were off the chart.” Michelle Zuidema said the readings ranged from 2.9 milligauss outside the house to anywhere from 3.5 to 17 milligauss indoors.

Ted Gaudette, whom the Zuidemas’ attorneys say conducted the testing, was unavailable for comment Wednesday.

According to Ted Zuidema, he contacted SDG&E; “several times” to complain about the problem, “but they could do nothing for me. I wrote them a letter asking if they could move the wires or purchase the house, and they just wouldn’t do it.”

The Zuidemas, who lived briefly in a trailer near Ted Zuidema’s parents’ home in East County, now live in Santee, after having sold the house on Broadview Avenue and taken what they call a $50,000 loss. In addition, they’ve had more than $10,000 in medical expenses.

They said they bought the house in 1985 for about $100,000 and when they tried to sell it, in early 1990, it was worth an estimated $200,000. They said it sold for about $150,000. Ted Zuidema is part owner of a South Bay motorcycle dealership and his wife is a homemaker. Attorney Withey said the house is now occupied by adult renters, who aren’t believed to be at risk in the same way as children or the fetuses of pregnant women.

But a woman who described herself as the wife of Doug Somera, the current tenant, said their four children now occupy the house with her and her husband. She listed their ages as 22, 20, 18 and 12. She said the couple rented the house from a landlord who happens to be Zuidema’s brother.

She said she and Somera were told about Mallory Zuidema’s cancer and the possibility it might have been caused by power lines next to the house. She said they decided to rent it anyway.

“We’ve had no problems,” she said, asking that her own name not be published. “But now, I’m kind of concerned. We hear about all kinds of things going on.”

Withey said he didn’t believe that any other home in Serra Mesa was at risk, at least not in the same way as the Zuidemas’ house. He said that, some time after the couple began complaining, SDG&E; removed the step-down transformer, which he targets as a primary villain.

“This is a distribution line, not a feeder line,” Withey said, pointing to the pole and tangle of wires next to the house. “This kind of distribution line should not be in a residential area this close to anybody’s house. They have the technology to raise it so that the fields are not as strong or to locate it elsewhere.

“So, in other words, there shouldn’t be any danger in this neighborhood, other than the Zuidemas’ house . . . that we’re aware of.”

Michelle Zuidema referred to a Denver study by Nancy Wertheimer and Ed Leeper in which as little as 2 milligauss was said to cause cancer in children. But John Dawsey of SDG&E; said the Denver study, as well as others, is inconclusive.

“The association found in Denver were between types of wiring in high current lines and leukemia,” Dawsey said. “David Savitz (from the University of North Carolina) took it a step further, taking measurements in the same homes as the Wertheimer-Leeper study.

“He found the opposite--a weaker association between actual measured fields in the home, and leukemia. The debate that ensued was, do you look at the wires or measure the fields?”

Dawsey called a recent USC study the best done to date. “It recorded 24-hour measurements in a neighborhood in Los Angeles (near power lines), and while noting a slight increase in the leukemia rate, found no association between measured fields and the homes involved.”

“That’s the reason this whole area is so up in the air. It may be the fields or something we haven’t learned to measure. It’s very confusing. The truth is, we just don’t know,” Dawsey said.

But Cedric Garland, an epidemiologist and expert in public health at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, said a reading of 17 milligauss inside the Zuidemas’ house would be quite high, depending on what appliances were turned on at the time.

Garland said the Wertheimer-Leeper study in Denver found a greater incidence of childhood cancer in homes 130 feet from step-down transformers attached to telephone poles. Such a device was 12 feet from the Zuidemas’ home.

“Even so,” Garland said, “we need more information. The electromagnetic fields around transformers are often rather complex. It would be helpful to have a spectrum of electrical energy to see if the (attorney’s) confluence theory is valid.”

“It’s hard for me to see electromagnetic fields as solely the cause of these types of cancers. These high exposures (to EMF) are not terribly unusual, yet the frequency of cancers is very low. However, if all the appliances were off and a 17 was still recorded . . . that is fairly substantial,” he said.

Garland said electromagnetic fields are created in the modern home in a myriad of ways--by home computers, television sets, electric alarm clocks on the night stand by a bed, by dimmers on light switches. He cautioned against sitting too close to television screens, especially a child playing video games inches away from the picture.

Garland said electromagnetic fields “induce the resonance of a calcium ion, which can interfere with intercellular communication.”

He said, “our (UCSD research) group believes that intercellular communication is what prevents cancer. When it’s disrupted, a precondition of cancer is thus created. It’s the large amount of electromagnetic radiation that disrupts communication among the cells” and can induce cancer.

Michelle Zuidema said nothing in either her or her husband’s medical history, or that of their families, issued a warning about Mallory incurring two rare kidney cancers. She believes it was caused solely by power lines and says it can be proved in court.

“I took very good care of myself when I was pregnant,” she said. “I had a very uneventful pregnancy. Though they tell me that Mallory was born with this, it didn’t surface for six or seven months. A couple of months after that, it was diagnosed at Children’s (Hospital).”

Mallory recently concluded 15 months of chemotherapy. At the moment, her cancer is in remission, but, according to her mother, doctors say “it can turn around at any moment, and she’ll always live with it. They tell us that, if it recurs in the next year or so, that’s very bad.”

She paused, then said, “We just had to get away from here, to give it the only chance we could.”