Casualties of pylons’ progress

Sue Fuller with daughter Gemma, 4. The family have been told the Transpower cables will go right through their property. Picture / Dean Purcell

Shattering news greeted Sue Fuller when officials from the state power lines company came knocking with the latest set of plans to erect a giant electricity pylon on her lifestyle block south of Auckland.

The news arrived hours before Transpower announced a preferred route for 490 pylons from Waikato to Auckland to bolster increasingly vulnerable power supplies to the top half of the North Island. It has become the biggest countryside controversy in years after Transpower decided it needed to build the line into Auckland to ensure supply.

Protesters have burned an effigy of chief executive Dr Ralph Craven in the main street of Tirau and claim the state company is ignoring the health and environmental effects.

It took Sue Fuller only a glance to see that Transpower wanted to take more land and hang 400kV cables closer to the family home.

"If the health of my children is put at risk I will be out of here in a flash," said the mother of two.

Five years ago, Sue and Neil Fuller lost their eldest child in a motor accident and fear another dose of emotional trauma from the possible health effects of living under high voltage power lines.

The Fuller's 28ha Brookby property already has a 110kV pylon, but it is 300m from their house. Neil Fuller, an electrician who has worked on high-voltage cables, convinced his wife the health risks were not an issue when they bought in 2000.

"These [the proposed pylon wires] are much larger and the magnetic fields much greater," said Sue Fuller, whose children are aged 4 and 6.

Residents of the idyllic hobby farming community of Brookby, with 130-year-old school and $2 million-plus lifestyle blocks, were yesterday hand-delivered notices by officials saying the width of land across their community needed for the pylons was being increased from 500m to 700m in places.

This was to address concerns by Ardmore Airport that 70m-high pylons through Brookby were a potential aviation hazard and, in places, "leaps into the air space".

Sue Fuller cannot understand the "pig-headed" attitude by Transpower towards the health effects and alternative options for the upgrade.

She described the experience as "stressful and very depressing", including a valuation wiping 40 per cent off a property "Neil has been working like crazy to transform from a rundown farm".

Transpower stressed the preferred route, which would affect 600 landowners, was only an interim decision before a final decision on the preferred route was made in July.

Chief executive Dr Ralph Craven said that decision would depend on the results of further environmental and engineering investigations and consultation with residents.

The Fullers' neighbour, John Corse-Scott, 61, said after yesterday's visit by Transpower officials: "From now on it's war."

He said Transpower officials would need a police escort and bulldozers to enter his property, and predicted the biggest civil revolt since the 1981 Springbok tour.

"If I go to jail, what the hell."