“We are going to make our judgment ourselves, we are going to stop this antenna”, warned Frédéric Sagères in progress. The breeder, who suspects this 4G antenna of affecting the health of his herd, took action on Thursday, the day after a decision by the Council of State in favor of operators. “At the end of the morning, we fell the circuit breaker. We didn’t break anything, we simply cut because it is no longer tenable,” said this farmer from Mazeyrat-d’Allier in Haute-Loire.
Several dozen people, including the mayor of the village, were present in support of this action intended to see if the condition of the cows improves when the antenna is deactivated, underlined the breeder. Frédéric Ségales indeed assures that the health of his cattle has deteriorated and that milk production has dropped since the installation of this 4G antenna in July 2021, about 200 m from his farm. He also claims to have lost about fifty animals out of 200.
The court of Clermont-Ferrand had ordered on May 23 the deactivation of the antenna for two months, to allow the continuation of the judicial expertise. The decision gave three months to the State and the operators (Bouygues Telecom, Free, SFR and Orange) to stop its operation.
“There will be lives sacrificed”
But the Council of State canceled this decision on Wednesday, noting an “error of law” and considering that the administrative court had “not characterized the existence of a serious danger”. The breeder has no doubts: “If they come to put it back in operation, we will have to stop and there will be lives sacrificed,” he said.
During the hearing in Clermont-Ferrand, the legal expert had pointed out that “this herd is part of the 10% to 20% best in the department” and that it had “no medical elements to explain the sudden drop of milk production, from 15% to 20%, in the days following the setting up of the branch”.
The lawyers of the operators had for their part put forward the absence of scientific element linking the health of cows to electromagnetic fields.
For the breeder’s lawyer, Maître Romain Gourdou, the decision of the Council of State was “a great disappointment”. “The mere fact of seeking the truth is not allowed to us,” he said, indicating that he was studying other remedies.
This decision “must not be overinterpreted: it does not signify either the settlement or the end of the dispute” and it is “essential that the judicial expertise prescribed by the judicial court can be completed”, however estimated Jean-Noël Barrot, Minister Delegate for the Digital Transition, in a written statement.