One Man’s Power Struggle : Author Ties Utility Lines to Cancer but Critics Label Him an Alarmist

Paul Brodeur knows power lines. And he fears them.

On drives across San Diego County in his Volvo station wagon, he gestures toward the high-tension wires he says angle perilously close to elementary schools, million-dollar homes and busy malls.

Like towering road markers, they have become his reference points. They have charged his professional life, invaded his conversations and often direct his train of thought.

Brodeur insists that power lines cause cancer, says their crackling currents hum a song of disease and death.

And for the past several years, over the cacophonous arguments of scientists, government and industry officials, the New Yorker magazine writer and book author has sought to expose the biological dangers of these invisible electromagnetic fields to a public he is convinced is still unaware.

His message: Stay clear. Get back. Beware.

“I don’t think we will ever again face such a pervasive public health hazard as posed by power lines,” said Brodeur, who divides his time between North San Diego County and his native Massachusetts. “They literally affect every living person.”

In San Diego and across the country, people are taking notice of the forecasts and dire warnings issued by perhaps the nation’s foremost environmental writer, watchdog and whistle-blower.

For a quarter of a century, Brodeur has been an often singular and always controversial voice on emerging environmental and occupational health hazards, a chronicler of industrial suffering. A toxic tattle-tale.

The 60-year-old author, who served as a counterintelligence agent during the Korean War, has taken the skills of spy work to focus on what he says is America’s newest enemy: the environmental hazards within its own borders.

In an in-depth series of New Yorker articles in the 1960s, he was the first reporter to uncover the then-insidious dangers of the asbestos used in building construction--and the reluctance of industry officials to own up to and correct the problem.

In subsequent years, his lectures, magazine articles and half a dozen books have also helped sensitize the nation to such issues as microwaves, ozone depletion, video display terminals and, most recently, the harmful electromagnetic fields he says are emitted by many power lines and common electrical appliances.

The power line danger, he insists, comes not only through the obvious electrical main lines draped across the huge pylons that resemble iron soldiers walking across the horizon. The peril also comes with the high-current wires carried by ordinary utility poles.

Many of these lines emit low-level electromagnetic fields that may well suppress the immune system, leading to the development of leukemia, cancer, and depression, he says. Their silent waves may also damage the central nervous system, altering the chemistry of the brain enough to cause birth defects and miscarriages. And once the utility companies admit to the problem, he says, they know they will have to do something about it.

For their part, utility officials have insisted for years that no cause and effect relationship has been established between electromagnetic fields and cancer.

In the meantime, they claim that Brodeur’s one-sided reporting and dismissal of contrary truths on the power line issue have only served to needlessly alarm and shock the general public.

“There are just a lot of areas where Mr. Brodeur departs from the accepted scientific practice in his interpretation of this issue,” said John Dawsey, environmental health administrator for the San Diego Gas & Electric Co.

“He’s very selective. He picks out the one extraneous study that finds a positive effect and ignores subsequent negative studies. His reporting is just not fair, it’s not at all balanced.”

Moreover, other critics have dismissed both Brodeur and his live-wire theories for their non-scientific background, labeling him an alarmist and “intellectual terrorist” who pedals fear for profit.

“He’s beyond the fringe--I think he’s dangerous,” said Robert Adair, a Yale University physicist who has been quoted in Brodeur’s articles on the power line controversy.

“I don’t think he has the foggiest notion of what he’s talking about.”

Environmentalists have nonetheless called Brodeur the “Paul Revere of environmental reporting” who has astutely alerted the American public to one hidden health hazard after another.

Despite numerous national awards for his books and articles, however, the author rankles at the label of investigative reporter: “I’m more of a literary entomologist who has spent 25 years overturning the rocks in the dark garden of private enterprise, describing what I have seen crawling out from underneath.”

Bespectacled and gray-haired, Brodeur is a prolific writer who is equal parts gadfly, journalistic gum-shoe and steely-eyed sparring partner for the industries involved in the issues on which he reports.

Armed only with his curiosity and an English degree from Harvard, he has educated himself on the complexities of physics and engineering--enough to do battle with countless pedigreed scientists from an array of specialties and fields.

A relentless researcher, colleagues say he treads and retreads through the facts and scientific rationale used in his stories--which are written longhand on yellow legal pads then typed on an old Smith-Corona manual.

Brodeur, they say, never stops asking questions. “People ask why I’m so dogged,” he said in his flattened Boston accent. “It’s my beat.”

For many, Brodeur’s work has a detective quality.

“He something of a Colombo type,” said Chris Brewster, the author’s son-in-law who is captain of the San Diego city lifeguard service. “He just isn’t going to go away until the issue is resolved. If I were in a situation where I was hiding something, the guy would irritate me big-time.”

At home in Leucadia or his Cape Cod cottage, Brodeur is an intensely private man who decades ago suffered the tragic loss of his 2 1/2-year-old son, Alan, who choked to death in his arms.

He is a novelist, short story writer and fishing fanatic whose career took an unexpected twist 25 years ago when, as a New Yorker staff writer under the direction of former editor William Shawn, he became the first author to unearth the then-unknown dangers of asbestos.

Years later, after pursuing numerous environmental and occupational health debacles, Brodeur says it’s now time to go back full-time to the fiction-writing that he left so long ago.

It’s a literary career that so far has produced three books, including a collection of short stories, one of which dealt with the aftermath of his son’s death. He also authored “The Stunt Man,” a novel which was made into a movie starring Peter O’Toole.

But first, he says, he has one more environmental book in him, a parting shot perhaps at the utility industry he chronicled in a series of New Yorker articles published in 1989 as the book “Currents of Death.”

The newest work, to be titled “Calamity on Meadow Street” after a 1990 New Yorker article of the same name, will further detail the serious health problems--the unexplained cancer and death--suffered by victims in three states, including several Connecticut families whose homes are near an electric substation.

The book will be Brodeur’s latest effort to awaken Americans to the perils of the man-made environments that surround them--as well as what he describes as the self-serving industries and timid government health mechanisms he claims refuse to admit the public health is at serious risk.

In his career, Brodeur has seen lots of environmental calamity. And what he has seen has made him sick to death: Bighorn sheep going blind high in the Andes Mountains, the victims of holes punched in the earth’s ozone layer. Male electrical workers throughout this country who have fallen prey to freakish bouts of breast cancer. Still other workers who have become sick from sitting too long in front of their computer terminals.

Since his first New Yorker report in 1968, Brodeur has developed a moral correctness and stubborn impatience with Big Business: He says he hates being lied to, misled or stone-walled by private enterprise concerns he says have suppressed vital safety information on their products.

He reserves his most cold-blooded contempt, though, for the asbestos industry he is convinced knew about the product hazards for a full half-century while tens of thousands of workers continued to die from adverse effects of breathing the substance.

Worse, he says, the same officials did not inform workers of the hazards even when X-rays from company-sponsored physical examinations first showed signs of the disease.

When workers eventually went to court by the tens of thousands, the Manville Corp., the nation’s leading asbestos producer, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Its lawyers also claimed that the government shared responsibility for the injuries because it did nothing to promote better safety for workers.

“They’re just ordinary people who for the reasons of money and job security have managed to suspend their sense of honor, decency and brotherhood,” he said of asbestos industry officials.

“They don’t anger me. I have contempt for them, which is an entirely different thing. For them to have used workers as shock troops, to have allowed them to die by the thousands is simply an un-American act. They’re cowards of the worst kind.”

Brodeur’s reports have taken on many other of the nation’s most hallowed sacred cows. The list of his adversaries reads like a Fortune 500 list.

He has been critical of the medical profession’s sluggishness to recognize environmental health hazards, claiming “the nation’s health is too important to be left in the hands of the American Medical Assn.”

He has slammed the newspaper industry for its failure to adequately report on the long-term hazards of using video display terminals, or VDTs.

And he nurtures a “sardonic amusement” for the very public he is trying to warn, people he says buy wholesale into the industry argument that just because a problem isn’t fully understood, the problem doesn’t exist.

“What gets me,” Brodeur says, “is the gullibility of the American people to keep accepting the same excuses over and over that tests are inconclusive about these problems while they continue to die unnecessarily early. It’s time the American public got skeptical.”

Brodeur has even harsher words for the scientists he says masquerade as objective researchers when they are in fact paid industry “whores” who have compromised the public health to see that their own projects are funded.

He calls it science for sale.

Scientists who have found themselves caught in Brodeur’s cross-hairs have returned their own fire.

“Anyone who disagrees with his views are considered conspirators,” said Yale University’s Adair, whose wife, also a researcher involved in the study of electromagnetic energy, has been accused by Brodeur of accepting money from utility companies.

“Oliver Stone on J.F.K. and Paul Brodeur on science are a good match. He’s proud of his asbestos reporting. But I think it’s a disaster that has resulted in the spending of a lot of money on a minor problem.”

But Brodeur has his supporters among scientists as well.

Dr. Milton M. Zaret, a research scientist who was interviewed by Brodeur for his 1977 book “The Zapping of America,” which described the dangers of microwave and radio-frequency radiation, called him the most thorough reporter he has ever met.

“On our first meeting, we talked at length on my research and he kept repeating ‘Doctor, can you prove that?’ Then he calls me several months later--now, we hardly know each other--and he says ‘Hello Milt. I just wanted you to know that I was able to independently confirm everything you told me.’

“He’s a very bright and thorough man, one who has educated himself to the point that he knows as much or more as the so-called scientists he talks to. He can debate them. And they’re not used to that with reporters.”

Praise for Brodeur has also come from families of the victims of environmental maladies he has detailed. And from those whose own environmental work he has inspired.

Bill Ravanesi’s father died from a disease associated with the inhalation of asbestos. Years later, he read “Expendable Americans,” one of Brodeur’s treatments of the subject, which launched him into his photographic work of asbestos victims.

“Rickey Lee Jones has a song lyric that goes ‘Our heroes are written right before us.’ For me, that’s what Paul Brodeur is, a hero. He has continually showed the way, like he used a crystal ball.

“With scientists and the rest of us, he has quite literally pointed and people have followed.”

Last June, Ravanesi published “Breath Taken: The Landscape and Biography of Asbestos,” a collection of photographs of victims of asbestos-related diseases, for which Brodeur wrote a forward.

“I don’t know anyone like Paul, who at the age of 60 has been able to continually bang away at these issues,” he said. “I’m surprised that he didn’t burn out 15 years ago. But he didn’t. Like the problems he writes about, he persists.”

Like the power line issue. In recent years, Brodeur has spent weeks on the road, reporting the stories of would-be cancer victims in Connecticut, North Carolina and California.

He has written about the potential peril at two local schools--La Jolla’s Bird Rock Elementary School and the Brooklyn Elementary School in Golden Hill--which he says sit dangerously close to high-current distribution wires and feeder lines.

“The health of our children is our nation’s greatest commodity,” he says. “And very little is being done to protect them from this ever-present danger.”

On drives throughout San Diego, Brodeur has pointed out the most potentially hazardous power lines to friends. He’s been known to pull his car to the side of the road, open the trunk and brandish a gauss meter, an instrument that measures the strength of a magnetic field.

Brodeur says his observations are natural.

“Twenty-five years ago, when I noticed workers blowing 500 tons of asbestos on high-rise buildings in Manhattan, only to see 200 tons adhere to the girders and the other 300 tons of asbestos fiber make their way into the lungs of hundreds of thousands of city dwellers, I commented on it.

“And now when I see children playing underneath high-voltage power lines that emit (energy) fields four to five times above the levels known to cause cancer, once again, you’re bound to remark on it.”

Looking back, Brodeur rues the fact that despite nearly three decades of hammering on environmental issues, no system has been established to adequately test the safety and health effects of products over the long haul.

And of course, he’s yet to run out of predictions for the problems he has unearthed--especially the so-called power line problem, which he says will result in an avalanche of litigation over the next generation to rival even the backlash of asbestos lawsuits.

“Asbestos was dismissed as a working-class problem,” he said. “But the power line threat cuts across socio-economic lines. In years to come, it will so outrage the middle class, which will result in political action.

“And it might not solely be on the basis of health issues. Because if there’s one thing the middle class doesn’t cotton to, it’s the diminishing of its property values.”

And when all this reaction finally hits the fan, he says, no one will be able to say Paul Brodeur didn’t try to warn them.