evidence: These days, the FCC’s laissez-faire approach is sparking resistance. Hundreds of conflicts have erupted across the country, triggered by citizens fearing risks to their health from wireless radiation, harm to their property values, damage to the environment and the destruction of treasured views. Fights are raging from rural Puerto Rico, where protesters have been arrested for blocking roads used by cell-tower-construction crews, to New York City, where a dozen community boards protested the appearance of visually jarring three-story 5G poles on neighborhood sidewalks. In New York, state officials got involved, then a local congressman. Finally, in late April, the furor grew intense enough that the FCC was forced to act; it belatedly ordered a company to halt construction — after more than a hundred poles had been built — and begin the type of reviews that are supposed to be completed before breaking ground. [...] In December 2015, the agency, with the FAA’s concurrence, finally approved a requirement for all new towers over 150 feet to use flashing lights. But the FCC rejected pleas to mandate that the tens of thousands of existing towers be retrofitted. Gehring quietly launched a personal persuasion campaign, emailing tower operators individually with a plea to voluntarily make the shift. Just a third of the tallest towers, the ones most lethal to birds, have been switched over to date.