Residents, village spar over LED lights in upstate New York

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MarieAnne Cherry is pictured at her home on Wednesday, March 8, 2023, in Cambridge, N.Y. She has been fighting the Village of Cambridge since 2020, when it replaced all of its street lamps with LED lights, which she says has resulted in her having hundreds of seizures. Lights near her home have been backdated with conventional bulbs. She is traumatized by LED lighting.

A collection of conventional and fluorescent lightbulbs are stored at MarieAnne Cherry's home on Wednesday, March 8, 2023, in Cambridge, N.Y. Cherry says she suffered seizures after streetlights near home were replaced with LED bulbs. She stockpiles old bulbs as LEDs have mostly taken over the market.

CAMBRIDGE — A historic village in rural Washington County would seem to be an idyllic place to live for those wanting to escape the sensory onslaught of city noise and lights.

But for the last three years, one Cambridge woman says she has been assaulted by LED lights installed on village streets, which she says trigger her photosensitive epilepsy and have caused her hundreds of seizures.

Ever since MarieAnn Cherry had her first LED-induced seizure in 2008, she said she has gone out of her way to avoid the ultra-bright lights, which she claims have the power to knock her off her feet and send her into convulsions.

The 62-year-old — backed by the signatures of 50 residents and nonresidents who have expressed concern for Cherry's health or have their own lighting concerns — is fighting with power provider National Grid and the village of Cambridge over the LED lamps, filing complaints with the state Division of Human Rights and state Department of Public Service.

Cherry first notified village officials of her photosensitive condition in 2017. In 2019, the village swapped 212 high-pressure sodium streetlights with environmentally cleaner, more energy-efficient LED lighting — a project subsidized by the state's Smart Street Lighting initiative, which aims to replace 500,000 lampposts with LED technology by 2025.

It's a transition that is happening in communities across the country, part of a nationwide push toward environmental goals, but little data has been collected on how LEDs affect people with photosensitive epilepsy.

"When the lights first appeared, I thought, I must not have explained myself properly. All I have to do is convey it to them in a way for them to hear it. It's real and it's serious and I can't stop it," Cherry said. "But there has never been an effort to solve it. There's been an effort to force me to accept it ... until I give up or go away."

Exasperated village officials say they have made a good faith effort to work with Cherry, including removing LEDs from some streetlights near her house, but have become increasingly skeptical of her claims, particularly after an anti-LED crusader from Oregon joined her cause and followed with his own letters to government agencies and officials on Cherry's behalf.

Cherry doesn't have a regular neurologist. She said her previous neurologist has retired and medical care is difficult due to there being LED lights in clinicians' offices.

A diagnosis letter from Cherry's former doctor, which states that she has photosensitive epilepsy, does not sufficiently demonstrate that LEDs are causing her seizures, according to Mayor Carman Bogle and the village Board of Trustees.

"It's been a tough one," Bogle said. "You are always trying to balance everybody's needs. But you are always going to have someone who is left out."

The village and National Grid have brought in lawyers and enlisted experts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Lighting Research Center to analyze the LEDs in Cambridge. The lighting experts — who are engineers, not physicians or photobiologists (the study of the interactions of light with living organisms) — primarily looked at flicker, which they found to be lower in the Cambridge lamps than in traditional HPS streetlights used in Troy. They concluded it was unlikely that flicker was a major factor in a resident's seizures.

According to the Epilepsy Foundation, photosensitive epilepsy occurs in three percent of people who have the neurological condition, though some researchers estimate the frequency is as high as 30 percent.

Flashing LED lights, just like traditional lights, can cause seizures in photosensitive individuals. Brightness and contrast also play a role. But epilepsy experts say it's unclear whether LEDs have distinct properties that provoke seizures.

For those who live with epilepsy, avoiding triggers is often the best medicine.

According to Cherry, exposure to LEDs has sensitized her further to harsh lighting. Before she encountered LEDs, her seizures would be preceded by an "aura," giving her time to get into a safer position.

"Now I am a split second away from being smashed to the pavement," she said.

Cherry has long purged her home of computers and smartphones, and each winter, her neighbors considerately skip the light-based holiday displays, she said. After the streetlights changed, Cherry quit her job as a pharmacy technician at Walgreens and started spending nights apart from her family at a friend's farmhouse.

But Cherry is not the only villager bothered by the streetlights. Connie Brooks, a neighbor who owns Battenkill Books on the village's main road, said she supports reverting to the old streetlights because the LED lights are affecting her sleep.

"One of the lights is right outside my bedroom," Brooks said. "I have nothing remotely like what Marie is dealing with health-wise, but I have had to put blackout curtains in my bedroom."

Cambridge resident Linda Anderson said the village has always been over-lit, but the new lighting is especially jarring.

"The village is lit up like an airport and it's really unnecessary," Anderson said.

Cherry's daughter, Sylvana Maione, said witnessing Cherry's seizures firsthand has been "beyond agonizing."

"To act like it's not happening and to act like somehow we aren't seeing what we are seeing. It is so insulting and so upsetting and painful," she said of the village's response.

The Cherrys live in a Victorian home with a wraparound porch a block from West Main Street where businesses and some of the brightest light fixtures are located.

In her Department of Public Service filing, Cherry is asking that all village fixtures be replaced with non-LED lights at a height below 20 feet — accommodations she says would enable her to safely walk a half mile to her former workplace and sleep in her own home. Village officials, however, say a more realistic solution is for her to move.

National Grid has since replaced five lights near Cherry's home at the village's expense, but Cherry says she is only protected from the glare on one side of her house. And when those five lamps burn out, National Grid says they will be replaced by LEDs, as the older technology will be harder to source.

The switch to LEDs saved the village $10,000 in energy costs in the first year, village officials said. Reverting the initial five units to HPS bulbs costs the village $223, $14 per unit plus a $154 installation charge, records show.

Anderson questioned why the village couldn't just switch out a few more bulbs to make Cherry's life easier. "It's not rocket science," she said.

Part of the challenge is that manufacturers have slowed production of HPS bulbs. Even if every light fixture was replaced with HPS lamps, the village would have to eventually revert back to LEDs.

Attorneys for National Grid argued in filings with the Department of Public Service that the company has accommodated Cherry by reverting the five streetlights. Most light fixtures in Cambridge are already at the lowest wattage offered by National Grid and cannot be dimmed, the company claims.

Switching all of the lights in the village for a single resident "would be a step backwards in terms of energy efficiency contrary to New York's climate policy goals, would present increased operating costs to the Village, and would be reverting to a lighting technology that is becoming increasingly scarce in the marketplace," National Grid attorneys wrote in filings.

Bogle and the board said they are just doing what every other municipality in the state is doing to reduce the village's environmental impact, but they are exhausted.

"I've been here eight years and these last few years have been the roughest," Bogle said. "I've noticed that a lot of longtime public servants are not running again. Because everybody's just had it. You work very hard, and you try to do right by everyone, but ultimately, you are not going to please everyone."

Complaints about light pollution have cropped up in other cities and towns across the U.S. as states move to phase out HPS streetlights. But medical experts and energy regulators have put out conflicting information on LED technology's effects on humans and the science is still emerging.

LEDs have a blue tinge that makes them appear bright white to the naked eye, while HPS and incandescent bulbs emit a yellow hue. The American Medical Association in 2016 warned that the blue color in high-intensity LED streetlights can create visibility issues on the road and disrupt sleep cycles.

The AMA recommends limiting outdoor bulbs to 3,000k (kelvins are units that measure color temperature) and using shields to prevent glare. Due to their coatings, fixtures with color temperatures less than 3,000k are slightly less efficient than their 4,000k counterparts, but they emit a warmer glow that is similar to traditional lighting, according to the AMA.

The U.S. Department of Energy responded that it is aware of the risks associated with various light sources, but LEDs can be modulated to fit the needs of individual communities. Energy officials dispute that blue-rich light poses a unique threat to humans in a fact sheet dispelling what they describe as misconceptions about LEDS.

"There's nothing inherently different about the blue light emitted by LEDs; that is, at the same power and wavelength, electromagnetic energy is the same, regardless of source type," federal regulators wrote. "And as the potential for undesirable effects from exposure to light at night emerges from evolving research, the implications apply to all light sources — including, but by no means limited to, LEDs."