Are You & Your Family or Pets At Risk?

In lawsuits filed against utilities, some farmers and now families contend stray voltage from overloaded power lines nearby has killed and injured families and animals.  So I ask are you and your family and pets at risk?  

I am asking for $10,000 to hire an appraiser ($3,000)  and an electrical engineer ($7,000) to verify that the electric company is covering up a problem that has damaged and killed many of my prize winning cows.

Ever since I was a little boy, all I have known is cows.  My grandparents farmed, my parents farmed, and I wanted to keep the tradition alive, so I farm. I hope to pass my love for cows to my future children.

 After high school, I started to farm on my own. It took me over 15 years to raise prize winning cows.  I moved off the family farm and rented a place of my own.  I spent hours tending to those cows every need. I have spent many sleepless nights helping a cow deliver a calf, only to watch it die in my arms.  I have given up all of my possessions so my cows could have the best. I spent my hard earned money on food for them to eat, medicine to treat to the sick cows, bedding so they would have a clean, dry place to lay at night.  I didn't even like it when they got dirty so I would constantly wash them.  All that hard work paid off, until I moved onto the new farm. 

At first, I thought nothing was wrong.  After a month, I started seeing changes in my cows.  They wouldn't eat. They wouldn't drink. Eventually they wouldn't even go into the barn.  I finally figured out what was wrong. It was stray voltage.  Most people blame it on how you manage cows, but this was unusual behavior. They were acting skittish and jumpy.   The behaviors were getting increasingly dangerous.  One night, as I was trying to get the cows into the barn, one cow decided to charge me.  I looked up and here was this 1500-pound cow barreling at me.  She struck me in the ribs and I flew and my head bounced off the skid loader. I must have stumbled out of the barn. My brother saw me pass out on the ground, picked me up, and rushed me to the hospital. I didn't know what happened.  But the one thing I did know, this behavior was completely out of control. 

After many legal hoops I had to jump through, I hired a man to test for stray voltage.  The electric company did not like this. They knew they had a problem and it would cost them money to fix it. In order to get this testing was done, I had to ask the court to get permission to go into the farm and test.  The electric company tried to bury me with the legal run-around.  They knew I could not afford the lawyer fees because I lost everything when the cows got sick.   But, I prevailed and the judge let me do the testing. Just to get onto the farm and hire an electrical engineer cost $17,000.  I had to do it - to save my cows.  One Saturday morning in June, 5 attorneys and 3 electrical engineers from the electric company showed up. I thought that was interesting.  They stood there and took pictures for over 5 hours.  If they didn't think there was a problem, why would they have sent all those high powered officials to watch the testing, especially on a Saturday morning? The results came in. The electrical engineer told me it was stray voltage.  But, he would have to do more testing to see exactly where the stray voltage was coming from. 

Which leads me to where I am at today.  I had spent all my hard earned money to do the initial testing.  Now, it is going to take even more money to get the final round of testing done. 

The electric company knows that there is a problem. Otherwise they wouldn't have tried to bury me in legal paperwork from the start.  They wouldn't have sent all those high powered officials to "˜watch and observe' the initial testing.  There is a reason they are called the "power" company.

As I have found out, when major corporations have problems, they assess the probability of someone like me actually throwing up a red flag.  If not fixing the problem is cheaper, they will take that route.  It doesn't matter what the residual effects are.  They don't care that my cows got sick. They don't care how many hours I have spent slaving over those cows, making sure they had the best possible life a cow could have.  They don't care that I lost everything I ever worked for.  All they care about is the bottom line.  It is cheaper to hire powerful lawyers to cover up the problem and to bury me in legal costs.  I have found out that they will go so far as to falsify research in order to cover up problems. 

Please help my cause. Big business needs to stop bullying the average person.  Someone needs to stand up to them. 

Please watch the video RAM trucks that aired during the Super Bowl. This explains many of the hardships of farmers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMpZ0TGjbWE