"FAULTY and UNSAFE" Cell Tower Application for Wheaton High School, But Board of Education will Ignore. Board of Ed will Let Application Proceed Because Children's Safety is Never on Their List.

Date: Mon, Oct 4, 2021 at 4:38 PM

Subject: FAULTY & UNSAFE Dish application at Wheaton HS

To: Lawrence, Boyd <Boyd_Lawrence@mcpsmd.org>
Cc:  Debbie <Debbie.Spielberg@montgomerycountymd.gov>, Wolff, Brenda <Brenda_Wolff@mcpsmd.org>

 

Dear Mr. Lawrence,

 

As you had predicted, the Dish wireless application for co-location on the cell tower that immediately abuts Wheaton High School is on the October agenda, returning for review for the Tower Committee. The Environmental Assessment (EA) was updated to include 12 T-Mobile antennas, rather than 9 T-Mobile antennas. In doing so the EA report more than doubled the ERP attributed to the T-Mobile antennas from 17266.65 watts to 35647.95 watts. However, as in the case with the old EA report, with prompting from the CTC Tower Coordinator, the Dish applicant continued to plug in dummy/generic numbers for the T-Mobile antennas rather than relying upon the readily-available County records for antenna data, and those dummy/generic numbers, unlike the actual numbers for the proposed Dish antennas, did not parse out individual antenna frequencies/channels. The T-Mobile antennas that were installed just months before the Dish application was filed had an estimated in T-Mobile’s application for minor modifications at the site maximum ERP of 91140.4 watts. Yet, the Dish EA estimates ERP levels for T-Mobile’s antennas that are less than half of T-Mobile’s max ERP. As a result, the Dish application in essence suggests that the addition of the second array of antennas to the Wheaton High School cell tower by Dish would produce a total ERP for the cell tower of 72045.07 watts; in other words, there would be a reduction in the ERP over the current 91140.4 watts that are being produced by the antennas on the cell tower right now. And the Dish EA report asserts that this would be accomplished by the addition of Dish antennas that would have max ERP of 36698.07 watts. Of course, these asserted results are ludicrous (though less ludicrous than the results in the previous Dish EA that only included 9 of T-Mobile’s antennas)!  Even if the Tower Coordinator and the Tower Committee will be turning a blind eye, MCPS and the Board of Education should not!

 

In updating the application, Dish only updated its Environmental Assessment and not the structural analysis, which was performed by an agent of the tower owner on February 23, 2021, and does not appear to be an arms-length engineers’ evaluation. The Dish structural analysis was performed before the installation of the T-Mobile antenna upgrade, which installed more and heavier antennas to the cell tower. Note that T-Mobile’s structural analysis rated the foundation’s critical demand capacity ratio at 105%, and cautioned that “any further changes to the appurtenance configuration should be reviewed with respect to their effect on structural loads prior to implementation (see below).

I know from past experience that bringing issues concerning structural sufficiency to the Tower Committee would be futile. These days, the Tower Committee’s response is that structural sufficiency issues are not its job, even when the documentation is supplied in the TFCG records. The Tower Committee simply hopes that DPS will catch the problem and act. Again, even if the Tower Coordinator and the Tower Committee is turning a blind eye to these matters, MCPS and the Board of Education should not!

 

As the representative for the Land Owner, you can stop this application from advancing now, and I ask that you do so.

 

Thank you.

 

Sue Present