A current affair: EMF hazards continue to stir controversy.

In the rustic New England shoreline village of Guilford, Connecticut, homes go for 250,000 and up. But if you want a bargain, visit Meadow Street, where any one of nine solid homes, some abandoned by their owners, are going begging, despite price tags of less than $100,000. The reason? The houses have an unwanted neighbor: a Connecticut Light & Power Company (CL&P) substation.

Power line and substations like the one in Guilford are surrounded by potent electromagnetic fields (EMFs) that have been solidly, if not conclusively, linked to brain cancer, childhood leukemia, birth defects and other afflictions. These EMFS are also emitted by common electric appliances like microwave ovens, refrigerators and computers, creating new demands on manufacturers to better shield their products.

EMFs are everywhere. Green Alternatives magazine sent its staff into their local community with a gaussmeter, a device designed to measure the strength of electromagnetic fields, and found potentially dangerous levels in some unlikely places - a staffer's dishwasher, and a local lunch hangout which may have had faulty wiring. But the highest readings were underneath telephone pole-type power lines. Obviously these permanently-"on" EMF sources represent far more risk than our appliances, which emit very local fields Only when in use.

EMFs are created by the movement of electrical current through power lines. They're nothing new, but studies on their effects are. Several recent ones, and a 1990 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) draft report, point to increased cancer risks for People with long-term exposure higher than two milligauss (mG). For perspective, the back of a desk lamp can emit 50 mG, though the field drops to 1.5 mG two feet away. Faced with the enormous potential cost of relocating or burying millions of miles of high-voltage wires, utilities are waging a not-too-subtle campaign to convince consumers that their humming power lines and largescale transformers are safe - even near schools and housing projects.

One such campaign is carried on by Central Maine Power, which publishes two ostensibly neutral newsletters called EMF: Between the Lines and EMF Keeptrack - though the newsletters are merely identified as products of The Center for Energy Information (CEI). Judy Franke, assistant director of CEI, denies that the newsletters are inherently biased. We think that people can draw their own conclusions," she says.

Utilities also hire their own scientists. Paul Brodeur, a writer for The New Yorker magazine and author of The Great Power Line Coverup, charges that two Yale University-affiliated epidemiologists who gave testimony and prepared an industry-favorable EMF report for the Connecticut state legislature were paid utility consultants. "In 35 years as a journalist, I've never seen such a blatant conflict of interest," says Brodeur. "And the state legislature never did a thing about it."

Connecticut's fight against EMFs is grassroots-based. Guilford's Robert Hemstock, whose son lived on Meadow Street, has been involved in the fight for three years. There have been a dozen serious illnesses among residents, including at least five brain cancers.

"I've looked at over 90,000 cancer death certificates [through the Connecticut Tumor Registry], and over 55 percent are within 100 feet of the power company's distribution lines," Hemstock says. "There's no question that EMFs are the source of these cancers." Hemstock's admittedly unscientific study of cancer cases in Guilford found 58 percent along the distribution lines, in only 11 percent of the town's homes.

Further down the shoreline, Karen Adams is a co-founder of Fairfield's Alliance to Limit Electromagnetic Radiation Today (ALERT), formed in 1991 after CL&P quietly won approval for a 115,000-volt power line along the commuter rail line from Bridgeport to Norwalk.

ALERT's prospects for success, however, were hampered by its late entry into the process. Few local residents read the tiny legal notice about CL&P's plans in the town paper, and fewer still showed up at the required public hearing. By the time Adams and her activist friends were alerted, the utility had a construction permit from the Connecticut Siting Council. "They notify us when they're going to repave the road," Adams says. "Why couldn't we be given prior notification about something as important as this?" They couldn't have picked a worse place, she contends - the power line goes right past a boys' club and a middle school.

Concerned about both health risks and property values, Adams' group immediately began a petition drive and signed on three pro bono attorneys. They called for an immediate injunction to stop the still-uncompleted line, which would sell excess power to Long Island. The Siting Council returned to Fairfield for an unusual second hearing but, last July, again approved the line in a 5-2 vote. ALERT took them to court, but their case was dismissed for lack of grounds. Adams vows to fight on. "There's litigation and legislation, and we are pursuing both avenues," she says.

Adams believes that the utilities could greatly reduce EMFs by putting their electrical cables eight feet underground instead of on overhead poles. This technique, says Adams, has been well-known for many years. "How do you think they do it in New York? The utilities are opposed because it costs twice as much, but it's actually cheaper in the long run." She says that buried cable, according to the utilities' own studies, emits as little as one mG of EMF directly above the line.

CEI's Franke notes that several states are funding EMF research; she says "the science just isn't there yet" to make definitive statements about the dangers of EMFs. And she's none too sanguine about buried cable either, noting that once it's underground, developers may still build right next to it.

Paul Brodeur says that Connecticut stands out because of its grassroots activism, but that the problem is now becoming widely known. "There's a tremendous brain cancer cluster [in Guilford]," says Brodeur, "and it can't just be explained away or studied to death. We now have 60 major studies saying EMFs are dangerous." The Swedish government flatly declared EMFs a hazard and has begun to mandate buried cable and siting requirements. So far, the U.S. government has shown no such inclination.

Contact: ALERT, 1616 Post Road, Fairfield, CT 06430/[phone]; CEI, 83 Edison Drive, Augusta, ME 04330/[phone]. The Great Power Line Coverup is $21.95 in bookstores, or contact: Little Brown and Company, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020/[phone].