Towers of Power : Electricity: Nurseries and birds love these high-voltage lines for low-cost land underneath and perching above, respectively. But some residents concerned about ill health effects wish the companies that own them would pull the plug.

Beneath a canopy of steel wires tautly strung between high-voltage transmission towers, the fresh smell of pine greets visitors to a Huntington Beach Christmas tree farm.

The farm is one of several agricultural businesses that make their home along the path of electric power lines throughout Southern California.

While electric transmission towers are a ubiquitous part of 20th-Century life, their presence evokes a spectrum of emotions. Agriculturists take advantage of relatively cheap land along the tower corridors, while others have sued local utilities claiming proximity to them has hurt their property values or their health. Oblivious to all but the convenience and the view, small birds see them as a perfect place to flock and perch.

Power towers and agriculture seem strange bedfellows, but nurseries and tree farms have used the land beneath the transmission lines since the early 1960s. Today roughly 450 nurseries and tree farms lease from Southern California Edison in Orange and Los Angeles counties.

“It is a symbiotic situation,” said Ralph Klages, former president of the California Assn. of Nurserymen, and owner of Landscape Grower’s Nursery in Monterey Park.

The electric company benefits because it collects rent from otherwise unusable land, and the nurseries prevent the corridors from becoming trash-ridden eyesores in the community.

“We come in and enhance the environment. In addition (to paying rent), we maintain the fences, the roads and take care of the weeds,” he said.

Because of safety regulations, no permanent structures may be built underneath the lines, and the electric company must have access to the land at all times to repair the lines and towers--even if that means trampling on nursery products.

“Our industry is a good fit for it,” said Ross Hutchings, a spokesman for the Sacramento-based California Assn. of Nurserymen. “Most of our nursery products are in containers, so they can be moved . . . if they have to bring in a big rig.”

While the land under the power lines was dirt-cheap 25 to 30 years ago, many nursery owners and tree growers are lamenting how rents have risen since then, Klages said.

Seven years of drought followed by two years of recession have hit the landscape and nursery industries hard, Hutchings said.

“We’re folding like flies under the power lines,” said Bud Lyon, owner of four Christmas tree farms in Orange County.

Nevertheless, renting from Southern California Edison is “still cheaper than renting from any other landowner,” Hutchings said.

And this year and next, Edison has agreed to hold nurseries at the 1991 rate, as a gesture of support for the recession-hit industry, Klages said.

While nurseries may see the transmission towers as a boon to business, others see them as ruinous to their financial health or physical well-being.

Ten San Clemente homeowners are suing the San Diego Gas & Electric Co. in Orange County Superior Court because they claim nearby transmission lines have decreased the value of their posh homes in the Mariner’s Point neighborhood. The trial is set for April.

Jean and Martin Covalt, plaintiffs in the suit, no longer want to live in their 5,000-square-foot home, with its tennis courts, sauna and citrus orchard, because they are worried about the effects of the electromagnetic fields emanating from transmission lines that run within 10 feet of their back yard. The couple want to move, but after halving the price of their home to $750,000, they have had no offers after 10 months.

“People simply won’t buy this home because of the wires,” Jean Covalt said, adding she doesn’t think anyone should live there.

A spokesman for SDG&E; rejected the homeowners’ arguments, saying the homes have decreased in value because of the weak California economy, not the towers.

The lawsuit is the result of a “well organized group of lawyers and writers who are trying to organize a mass litigation utilizing the scare of electromagnetic fields,” said Greg Barnes, an SDG&E; attorney.

Elsewhere in the country, communities are concerned over the possible health risks of high voltage power lines. In Millbury, Mass., residents blame power lines for the headaches, troubled pregnancies and unexplained illnesses plaguing the community. Millbury is on the central junction of electrical transmission lines in the state.

In San Diego, Ted and Michele Zuidema claimed their 6-year-old daughter developed Wilm’s tumor, a rare form of cancer, because of the high voltage lines that stood within 15 feet of their house. But in May, a jury rejected the couple’s suit, which sought nearly $1 million in damages from the San Diego Gas & Electric Co.

Many involved in the nursery business don’t seem to give a second thought to power lines or their electromagnetic fields.

“No one talks about it or worries about it. It’s not a big concern on our part,” said Laura Waterworth, a salesperson at Village Nurseries in Huntington Beach, which is beneath a tangle of high-tension lines.

Bob Perkins, who works at Lyons Christmas Tree Farm in Huntington Beach, agreed.

“I don’t think it’s any more than being in your house. They don’t bother me a bit,” he said.

And of course, power lines and utility poles in all sizes are not likely to disappear soon. Orange County residents will spend some $900 million on electricity this year.

More than 5,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and smaller distribution wires are draped from poles and towers all across Orange County, said Charles Wilson, a spokesman for Southern California Edison.

The 60-foot-high transmission towers connect lines carrying 66,000 to 220,000 volts of electricity from power sources--such as dams, the San Onofre nuclear power plant, wind stations, and power stations as far away as Washington--to substations that decrease the amount of voltage and transfer it to wires strung from poles that run throughout neighborhoods and into homes.

The towers and power lines are so common they have blended into the landscape and are used as convenient gathering points by flocking birds.

In the winter months European starlings, among other species, flock to the high-voltage lines by the thousands.

“You would think their feet would tingle,” said Ginny Chester, president of the Sea & Sage Chapter of the Audubon Society of Orange County.

But since the small birds sit with both feet on one wire, they do not complete an electrical circuit and are therefore safe, she said.

“It’s only when a large bird with a large enough wing span touches two wires at once that it gets electrocuted,” Chester said.

To help protect larger birds, Southern California Edison has installed perches on towers near the Santa Ana River, Long Beach and in rural areas.

And so, along with electricity, and legal battles about health problems and property values, towers are also providing a great place for red-tail hawks to survey the land.

“They like to sit on a high perch to look and see where their food is,” Chester said.