Upper Ojai Residents Face the Nemesis Next Door : Dispute: They have banded--and bonded--in fight against tower. But the couple who allowed it to be built say they feel surrounded by enemies.

Bill and Tina Kee used to get along just fine with their neighbors on Sulphur Mountain. That is, when they ever saw their neighbors. Their part of the Upper Ojai is a rural, unincorporated area where homes are often hidden down half-mile, rutted driveways. It’s a long walk for a cup of sugar.

It’s home to many urban refugees trading the amenities and hazards of city life for a little peace of mind and a chance to gaze at a star-filled night sky. There is no cable TV, no pizza delivery and the closest food store is 15 minutes away. It’s a way of life that several hundred families here have chosen and strive to protect.

“If you ever moved to a rural community like this, you’d want to know people like Bill and Tina,” said Diane Gordon, who lives a little way down the road from the Kees with her husband, David, 27 goats, and an assortment of dogs and cats. “They were probably our best friends on the mountain before all this happened. It’s just so sad.”

“This” is the giant Doppler radar tower that the Kees allowed the National Weather Service to build on the edge of their property, marring the formerly flawless view that includes the Oxnard Plain, Santa Monica Mountains and Channel Islands.

Now Kee worries about his safety.

“I don’t want my picture in the newspaper,” he said. “I don’t want one of those kooks shooting at me. I’ve already gotten plenty of threats.”

Ironically, the ominous tower that made a simple and kindly man like Kee such a pariah has brought other Upper Ojai residents together in ways they never thought possible.

“None of us knew each other before the tower went up,” said Virginia Loy, making herself comfortable in a neighbor’s cozy living room with several other new but close friends. “Now we’re a neighborhood.

“That’s the good thing about the tower. We’ve made a lot of lasting friendships.”

Used to be people didn’t see much of one another on Sulphur Mountain.

“It was like the only way you’d meet people was when a bunch of cute pigs or goats wandered into your yard and you’d call around to see whose they were,” said Gail Garber, placing a tray of cheese and crackers in front of a smiling Loy. Antsy children rush over to gobble up the snacks.

“You kind of have to be a recluse to live up here,” neighbor Lance Berglund agreed. “It’s quiet. That’s why we live here.”

Atop the Ridge

The tower. As the car strains up the steep grade of Sulphur Mountain, Gail Garber’s husband, Bruce, becomes more agitated the closer he gets to it. Like some powerful magnet, it pulls him closer, only to be repulsed by it when he finally arrives.

“There it is,” said Bruce Garber, a bespectacled English professor with a fondness for quoting Britain’s Romantic poets. “This is what has cast such a pall over our neighborhood. This is what leaves us in a constant state of anxiety worrying about our children’s health.

“Instead of impulses from a vernal wood, I’m getting impulses from a radar tower,” he said, paraphrasing William Wordsworth’s poem “The Tables Turned.”

From afar, it doesn’t look like much. A giant green golf ball hovering above the 2,700-foot-high, oak-filled ridgeline. Up close--close enough to hear an unnatural humming noise above the wind-swept pasture--it’s another story. The sphere, 30 feet in diameter and resting on a 68-foot tower, looks more like a bad architectural joke--a geodesic house on stilts.

But this is no house, and it’s clearly not a joke. It’s a microwave radiation tower that shoots a walloping 750,000 watts of pulsating power in a concentrated beam hundreds of feet above the horizon, piercing clouds up to 250 miles away. Like a Denny’s Restaurant, it’s operational 24 hours a day.

The tower is one of 112 in the nation and six in California--all part of the National Weather Service’s attempts to modernize and provide better, more accurate information.

“Since (the radar tower) was installed, we’ve done a much better job of forecasting,” said Todd Morris, director of the weather service station in Oxnard. “It’s been a tremendous help, especially for emergency services and planning.”

The tower utilizes the Doppler effect. It bounces beams off distant clouds to discern their moisture content, and determine how soon and how hard it will rain, an obvious concern in flood-prone Ventura County. Viewers of network newscasts are probably familiar with weather forecasters bragging about their station’s Doppler capabilities.

Communities across the nation have either welcomed the radar stations or greeted them with indifference, Morris said. “Fewer than a handful of communities have had a real problem with them. In the Midwest, they can’t live close enough to one. They feel safer knowing where the next tornado will come from.”

And these towers are safe, Morris insists. “These people have nothing to fear. The radiation emissions are 120,000 times below federal health guidelines. It’s safer than a cellular phone.”

The tower. It’s a meteorological wonder gnawing away at Upper Ojai residents, quickly consuming their lives.

Community Unites

It was a fine Thanksgiving weekend in 1993 when, suddenly, there it was. Full-bellied residents looked up from their dinner tables, astonished. But what was it?

That’s when the neighborhood-that-wasn’t came together and kicked into action.

Neighbors started getting flyers in their mailboxes asking if anyone knew what it was. Then everyone started calling each other.

The tower had been installed in three days.

It didn’t take long before the neighbors organized into a living-room brigade. They weren’t just taking on City Hall, after all; they were taking on the federal government. To them, it was a simple matter of right and wrong, with a supporting cast of characters the likes of actor Larry (J. R.) Hagman--the famous, deep-pocketed neighbor who lives near the tower--and Elbert (Joe) Friday--the weather service administrator in Washington who just won’t move the tower.

There were the letter-writing campaigns, the weekly board meetings, the fund-raisers that generated more than $50,000, the rallies, the petitions, the meetings with politicians and weekends devoted to staffing information booths in surrounding communities.

A year and a half later, the tower still stands. But the group, which calls itself Ventura County Citizens Against Radiation Exposure, won’t back down. Members plan to raise $250,000 this year and have already hired a veteran campaign director.

Milton Kramer has never seen anything like this neighborhood.

“In all the time I’ve been in this business, I’ve never met a group quite this dedicated,” said Kramer, who has worked on more than a dozen statewide and local ballot initiatives. “Whether it’s something in the climate in Ojai that produces those people, I don’t know, but they’re committed. They are deadly serious.”

Even the National Weather Service acknowledges that this is one neighborhood that won’t go away.

“Obviously, they refuse to give up and will continue fighting until the tower is moved,” Morris said.

The people of Upper Ojai object to the tower for a number of reasons. First of all, they say, it’s ugly. Sulphur Mountain isn’t the kind of place where large objects with such military-sounding acronyms as NEXRAD (Next Generation Radar) are installed, they say.

“It’s just so industrial,” Bruce Garber said. “It’s surrounded by barbed wire and protected by a silent alarm system. It’s just so out of place.”

Then there’s the complaint about how quickly it was installed--and with hardly any notification or discussion of strict local zoning laws.

“When we asked the federal lawyer why they didn’t even consult our zoning laws, he said, ‘We don’t have to obey local laws.’ It was such bureaucratic arrogance,” Garber said.

That’s what infuriates them, but that’s not what keeps them up at night worrying about their children and compelling them to spend endless hours and dollars to make it go away.

It is fear that motivates this neighborhood.

“When I used to look out my bedroom window, I saw the oak trees on the ridge,” Virginia Loy said. “Now I see a monster . . . and I don’t know what it’s doing.”

The weather service insists that the radiation emanating from the tower is harmless. So does Bill Kee. They have plenty of medical studies and anecdotal evidence to prove it.

But the neighbors have their own medical evidence and anecdotes. They complain of earaches, nausea and even quirky phone reception.

“We’re not a bunch of kooks,” Garber protested, pointing to the stacks of carefully underlined medical studies on his living room floor. “Our fears are reasonable fears.”

“Look,” he said. “They can’t prove it causes cancer, but they can’t prove it doesn’t. We won’t be experiments.”

And so it goes, the case of the dueling scientists.

Friends Lost

The neighbors are confident that someday they will win this fight. Right now, Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) is working to push legislation through Congress to have the radar tower relocated.

But tower or no tower, Lance Berglund won’t move from Sulphur Mountain. He gave up too much to move here six years ago. He would rather die up here, he said.

So would Kee, who has owned his property since 1961.

Kee has fewer neighbors now. Kenneth Fuller next door couldn’t take it anymore and moved his family to Oregon. All that’s left are his sarcastic, sad signs popping out of his meadow alongside the road beneath the tower--the rantings of a family man driven to desperation.

“Honk if you hate the tower, Politicians had no power, And our radiation headaches feel sour,” reads one.

Several other neighbors have tried to get away but found that their homes suddenly aren’t worth what they used to be.

And so Kee, the man who always notified neighbors of brush fires and rushed over to dig firebreaks with his tractor, is bitter.

The man who introduced Diane and David Gordon to other people on the mountain when they moved in several years ago doesn’t much like his neighbors anymore.

Kee won’t even wave back at the Gordons when they pass him on the road.

“We were here before they were up here and we can live without them,” Kee said. “You think they’re your friends, and then they stick it to you.”

Was it worth it? Would he still lease the property to the National Weather Service for $750 a month if he could do it all over again?

“What are you going to do?” he said. “I might not have done it if I’d known. Now I don’t know what to do about it.

“It’s here now.”