Letter: Choose different location for cell tower

To the editor:

Regarding resident Adrian Lynch’s comments about the health risks presented by the proposed cell tower’s proximity to Southold schools, I am similarly alarmed. In your article, Ms. Lynch alluded to the lack of research directly connecting cell tower RF radiation and increased cancer risks in children.

Before the Town Board votes on this proposal to place a cell tower just blocks from Southold schools, it owes every student the due diligence of speaking to the teachers, parents and children of the Bayville (North Shore Nassau County) elementary school where cellphone antennas were installed near the school. The number of children contracting cancer and leukemia far exceeds coincidence, and the suffering is even more tragic considering how preventable it was.

Can the board say with absolute confidence that there is no link between RF radiation and cancer in children (which is sometimes insidiously not manifested for years); that the cellphone radiation near the Bayville school had nothing to do with the student who underwent 102 weeks of chemo before his leukemia finally went into remission or the child with a recently diagnosed brain tumor the likes of which doctors haven’t seen before or the two students who died of leukemia, or the teacher whose class was closest to the cellphone antennas having a double mastectomy?

I’m not opposed to a cell tower. I am opposed to this proposed location surrounded by a vulnerable population and I am not opposed to a cellphone tower that will fill town coffers with several thousand dollars a month. But what price is worth gambling with our children’s health? I urge all parents to express their concerns before the Town Board votes Jan. 28 to proceed with this cell tower’s installation.

Catherine Harper, Mattituck