Personal experence talking here! We use to shoot .22 rimfire rifles off the side of a bridge in the country here that had a high power electric towers running over head. One day I noticed that my rifle was shocking me when I touched the trigger guard just before shooting. I could actually hold the gun by the plastic stock, inch my finger twards any metal part of the gun and a small arch would appear with a tingling shock, so the fella isn't tellin a big one!
After this experence I would not want to live close to one of those, it would be like living with your microwave door open all the time! I also have a friend who works for TVA as a lineman doing helocopter line checks and in the air repairs and I can tell you that there are instruments that can detect when a insulator is going bad just by the field around it. Why do you think those lines have to be so far from anything metal? He says that if you get closer than 5 ft of one of the lines, you will become the path of least resistance to the ground and ZAP! You just became a poodle in the microwave!