Two worlds collide in Uffing

Created: 10/30/2022, 7:30 p.m

By: Rafael Sala

A transmission mast for 5G, here near Bernau.

© DPA/Bildfunk

5G technology is a topic that has been heating up in Uffing for a long time.

Supporters and opponents have now exchanged views in the municipal council meeting.

Uffing

- It will be a conversation under special circumstances - trusting in a lively exchange of information, certainly with benevolence, but at the same time without any real desire, more out of the necessity of having to have it.

Anyone who followed the most recent meeting of the Uffing municipal council was given exactly this impression under the first item on the agenda: "Mobile network expansion, proposals from the Uffing-Schöffau citizens' initiative".

After a discussion lasting around ten minutes, the elected officials agreed, gnashing their teeth, that they would approach the representatives of the citizens' initiative at a meeting that was to be scheduled shortly.

The topic: equipping the planned mast at the sewage treatment plant in Uffing with the new 5G mobile phone technology.

A tense topic, one that has been heating up spirits in the Staffelsee community for a long time, because here the fronts are directly opposite each other: on the one hand, the number of those who advocate the new technology for the network expansion in the 3,000-inhabitant community on the other hand those who believe that 5G endangers health and therefore bitterly fight the technology.

The antenna is a 43 meter high lattice mast that the mobile phone provider wants to equip with the technologies GSM (for cell phone calls), LTE (for telephony and mobile Internet) and 5G via its subsidiary Vintage Towers (we reported).

It is certain that the mast will come - according to the citizens' initiative, they do not want to prevent it at all.

Except that the controversial 5G technology is being added, but she wants to fight back.

“We are only concerned with a moratorium on 5G.

We have a duty to protect the population,” said doctor and homeopath Miklós Takács, who was seated in the audience and was granted the right to speak by the panel at the request of the initiative.

He pointed out that when the municipality signed the contract with Vodafone in 2012, 4G was still the standard.

In the meantime, however, "decisive findings" about the successor 5G have been added, which must be heard.

"Because they prove the extreme health risk." His wish: the community may send representatives to an information evening at which a top-class expert from Stuttgart on mobile phone technology will be present.

"Our request is that he be heard," Takács finished his appeal.

That's all.

Uffing now wants to send representatives of the building committee there – albeit with a crying eye rather than a laughing one.

Because in the committee, the view has prevailed that the existing location and the contracts with Vodafone should no longer be shaken up.

As part of a "very complex procedure" one was able to agree on the mentioned area - altogether one of four - with the mobile operator, recalled Mayor Andreas Weiß (independent).

"If the community were to say now: We are not sticking to the plans, we would get an uncontrolled growth of masts and would no longer have a right of co-determination."

Second Mayor Josef Diepold (WGU) was upset.

He sees "no need" for a meeting between the two groups.

Although one cannot rule out that 5G is harmful to health, one cannot prove it either.

He notices – and dislikes – that on this sensitive topic only those who are against it are listened to.

But they are in the minority.

The majority want 5G.

In any case, he himself is repeatedly asked on the street when the mobile phone mast will finally come.

"The proponents just don't make themselves as clearly recognizable as they are here." The excavators should have rolled onto the site on September 26, but the start of construction had to be postponed, said Weiß.

However, he expects that it will be so far in the autumn: