Is Your Power Company Trying to Kill You?

Almost everyone is familiar with the sticky tar-like secretions and the asphalt smell oozing from wooden utilities poles on a hot summer day. These poles line the streets of many, if not most American cities and towns. They are covered in notices and the accumulated staples of flyers from years past. Look closely, and you’ll see a molten mess oozing off the pole onto the ground and into the paper flyers. What you probably don’t know that that messy stain is one of the most toxic substances known to mankind.

In the 1980’s EPA banned the use of dioxin for all uses, except one. To preserve wooden utility poles from insects and rot they are dipped in the pesticide pentachlorophenol (“penta”). Penta is an oil containing a toxic brew of chemicals known collectively as Dioxin. Penta is used to treat more than one million utility poles in Northern California alone. EPA banned the pesticide in the 1980's – one of only five chemicals the agency has ever banned. But utility and chemical manufacturing lobbyists secured a loophole from the regulation, allowing utilities to continue to use Penta to treat the poles placed by the millions on our streets and sidewalks, on playgrounds and schoolyards.

In 2009 the California-based Ecological Rights Foundation launched an ambitious campaign to get Dioxin out of our neighborhoods. The Foundation was founded in 2004 to clean up Dioxin from paper mills in Northern California. They soon expanded their work to eliminating heavy metals and other toxins consumer products. The Foundation has forced manufacturers to reformulate hundreds of products we use everything from children’s toys, cloths, and Halloween costumes, to computer equipment, hardware, and phone and power cords. Six years later, thanks to hundreds of legal actions, many companies have reformulated their products. When it began, about 90 percent of the consumer products the Foundation tested contained lead. In 2010, the Ecological Rights Foundation estimates that less than 10 percent of the products it finds on store shelves in California contain this toxin.

Then, in 2009, the Foundation became aware of another unrecognized threat in our midst. The family of chemicals referred to as dioxin are among the most toxic man-made chemicals known to science. The US EPA has stated that there is no safe level of exposure to dioxin. Dioxin damages the immune system and reproductive systems. It interferes with endocrine (or hormonal) system. And the science on cancer is irrefutable; dioxin is a known human carcinogen.

Yet our power and phone companies continue to install new utility poles soaked in dioxin, and pump dioxin into older poles. That dioxin washes off the poles when it rains and sloughs onto the sidewalk in the heat. The dioxin oil oozes out of the poles ultimately reaching our homes, our food and our bodies. The Foundation has measured frighteningly high levels of dioxin in the dirt surrounding utility poles and in rainwater dripping off of these poles. This dioxin can be traced into local streams and into major waterways, like San Francisco Bay, which is impaired by dioxin-polluted sediments. EPA studies show that Dioxin stays in the environment for decades and that it bio-concentrates as it moves up the food chain – meaning that the higher you are on the food chain, the higher the doses you are exposed to.

According to a California State Water Board study, what leaks out of the poles contains dioxin at levels up to 150,000 times EPA’s “acceptable level” for dioxin in residential soil. Dioxin-laden soil gets blown into the air as dust; people get it on their shoes and track it home, where it comes off on the carpets their kids play on. Parents should never allow their children to touch or play with utility poles. But standing at my front door in San Francisco, I count seven of the poles lining my street. Twelve wooden utility poles line the block of my children’s elementary school.