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—Rob O’Flanagan, GuelphMercury.com (10/27/10)
FERGUS — A massive protest greeted officials from wpd Canada in Fergus Tuesday evening, and flowed into the renewable energy developer’s open house on the proposed Springwood Wind Project (formerly known as Belwood Wind Farm), a four turbine wind energy system planned for agricultural land in the northwest corner of Centre Wellington.
Upwards of 1,000 people, several horses and a wagon filled with manure occupied the front parking lot of the Centre Wellington Sportsplex on Belsyde Ave E. at around dinner time Tuesday. The manure wagon was used to ridicule premier Dalton McGuinty’s renewable energy policies.
Hardy protesters, many of them agricultural people, defied a downpour and shouted approval for speakers who warned against suspected human health hazards associated with wind turbine noise, and the threat the giant windmills have on birds and bats.
“In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs allege . . . physical harm and adverse health effects, including the inability to sleep and repeated awakening during sleep, headaches, dizziness, stress and tension, extreme fatigue, diminished ability to concentrate, nausea and other physiological cognitive effects.
“The lawsuit attributes the adverse health effects to low frequency and sub-audible infrasound and/or impulse noise created by and emitted from turbines in the Ubly area wind park.”
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—Kate Hessling, Huron Daily Tribune (10/23/10)
BAD AXE — Dates have been set for a case evaluation and jury trial for the lawsuit filed by 20 Huron County residents claiming the Ubly area Michigan Wind I development has harmed their quality of life and lowered property values.
Huron County Circuit Court officials said a case evaluation will be conducted July 21, 2011 and a jury trial has been scheduled for Oct. 4, 2011. The dates were set after a pretrial hearing that was held Thursday.
—Stephana Johnston, Clear Creek, Ontario (10/22/10)
My neighbors & I are requesting a private member’s bill in the Ontario legislature, asking for fair compensation for our now unlivable homes because of Ontario government policies which allowed AIM Power Gen/IPC to erect the 18 Vestas 1.65 MW industrial wind turbines (IWT’s) in the Clear Creek/Cultus/Frogmore IWT ZONE, all jammed within a 3 km radius surrounding our homes.
Since November 2008, we have been suffering ill health from the vibrations emanating from the 18 IWT’s. Approximately 12 homes have been abandoned within this 3 km radius, about 9 houses are vacant/for sale, about 8 houses are occupied/for sale, and approximately 8 houses are only used sporadically on weekends.
We have also experienced both an unsuccessful as well as a successful suicide.
How many other communities of our size have had such a history within a 23 month period?
—Scott Learn, The Oregonian (10/22/10)
Oregon has boosted wind energy projects with a vengeance in recent years, adopting a renewable power standard and tax breaks that have helped spread wind farms across the state’s northern reaches and into eastern Oregon.
Now comes the Oregon Public Health office, which announced Thursday that it’s embarking on a public health assessment of wind farms, kicking off with three “listening sessions” next month in LaGrande, Pendleton and Arlington to hear residents’ health concerns tied to the spinning blades.
The health issues are part of a broader backlash in Oregon and nationwide from critics who complain of negative impacts on scenery, property values, wildlife and tourism.
The growing number of wind farms has led to more complaints about their health effects, said Sujata Joshi, an epidemiologist in the environmental public health office. Health concerns raised to date focus on noise and vibration generated by the huge turbines.
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Attention all you knuckleheads in Ontario, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and elsewhere in Canada who fled your homes because of Wind Turbine Syndrome: You blew it!
The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), a 4,000-member, nationwide group of clean green-scrubbed clinicians, has concluded your health problems are “anecdotal.” (Please overlook the fact of the non sequiturs in their “Fact,” below. They’re only docs, after all, not logicians.)
Yeah, you left your home—or you’re stuck in your acoustically toxic home and can’t sell the damn thing—for reasons that fail to rise above mere “anecdote.” By implication, you are an anecdote, your health problems are anecdote, and your “claimed” suffering is anecdote. (Anecdotes, by the way, are but a cat’s whisker removed from a joke. Remember that.)
In sum, you’re a dummy.
“There is no scientific data that proves these claims.” (Don’t you just love medical doctors? Spilling with knowledge. Compassion. Wisdom. Minds—minds, um, like a steel trap.)
Where does this leave Pierpont’s book, “Wind Turbine Syndrome”? According to this crowd, it ain’t—drum roll, please!—”science.” Johns Hopkins MD, Princeton PhD (Population Biology), National Merit Scholar and cum laude graduate Yale University in science—but her book ain’t science. It’s . . . fluff. Just stories. As in, “That’s a sort of interesting, mildly entertaining little story. Tee hee. Now, let’s get real. How would you like your green eggs & ham?”
All you poor saps who think you have Wind Turbine Syndrome: it’s been one big huge terrible mistake. You can go back home now. Or, if you’re already home, quit fakin’ it, for pete’s sake!
And, don’t forget to send CAPE a note of very deepest heartfelt thanks for puncturing this suppurating clinical hoax: webmaster@cape.ca.
—Chris Shannon, Cape Breton Post (10/6/10)
Sitting at their kitchen table Bruce and Janet Fraser stare out the window to see five sleek giants just beyond their backyard, churning in a counter-clockwise direction and changing line with the wind speed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
It’s become the couple’s nightmare.
“It’s in your face, you can’t escape it,” Janet Fraser said during an interview in the kitchen of the couple’s nine-year-old custom-built, two-storey home.
“You can’t go outside to relax and you can’t stay inside to relax. There’s no enjoyment. There’s no peace.”
—Evelyn Morrison, The Shetland Times (10/13/10)
It is now over a week since I asked Viking Energy where I could read the Health Impact Assessment for the windfarm project and since no-one has got back to me I have done my own research. Members of the public will, I am sure, be very interested in my findings.
Dr Nina Pierpont, a leading New York paediatrician, has been studying the effects of living near wind turbines in the US, the UK, Italy, Ireland and Canada for the past five years. She has concluded that there are susceptible people who are at risk of developing heart disease, tinnitus, vertigo, panic attacks, migraine and sleep deprivation. Dr Pierpont has called this Wind Turbine Syndrome – the results of abnormal stimulation of the inner ear’s vestibular system. There is also the problem of vibro acoustic disorder which can cause changes to the structure of certain organs such as the heart and lungs. Flicker and strobe effect caused by light thrown off the blades will have a significantly powerful effect on anyone suffering from migraine or epilepsy.
In 30 years of appraising, studying and consulting on all types of real estate and development projects, I have never seen the effects, impacts and reactions of the magnitude or severity that turbine neighbors and their property rights are subjected to. Short of a nuclear reactor meltdown (e.g., Chernobyl), nothing has caused so many people to experience the physical and health-driven need to relocate. It is amazing that industry and government both are doing absolutely nothing to address this trend, and correct it before it is too late for even more residents.
If this continues unchecked, I predict a series of rural “ghettos”—of abandoned, unmaintained homes, and an economically disadvantaged class of people finding these devalued homes to be the only place they can afford. Great places to hide illegal operations—few neighbors, cheap structures and the ability to vacate in a hurry if the heat gets turned up—much like the old buildings in poor neighborhoods in the cities. Who else is going to want them?
Wind companies should be required to offer buy-outs at market value (pre-project value) within 2 miles of projects, and certainly within the massive footprints. In this manner they can prove they are not destroying value by reselling for the same price. However, in each instance I know of when a wind developer did indeed buy and resell a neighboring home, they re-sold for 60% to 80% below their purchase price.
Thus, an erosion of homeowner equity has in fact been proven by the cause—the wind industry itself.
Any readers who have factual information or personal accounts of this nature are invited to email details contact me to discuss.
Mike McCann
McCann Appraisal, LLC
500 North Michigan Avenue
Suite 300
Chicago, Illinois 60611
(312) 644-0621
(312) 644-9244 fax
—Eric Bibler, WTS.com guest editor
I just discovered that Cape Wind’s 25-square mile industrial plant in Nantucket Sound is in fact not a “wind factory,” a “sprawling open air industrial wind plant” or even a “wind farm,” as I had supposed.
According to Cape Wind, it is officially a “Wind Park.”
This is an inspired choice of words!
I am already drafting letters to my local town selectmen asking if we can change a few names around here, such as: “Trash Park,” “Sewage Treatment Park,” “Coal Fired Electric Park” and “Maximum Security Correctional Park.” (Well, we don’t actually have one of those, but perhaps we can call the local jail a “Liberty Deprivation Park” –- or something like that.)
I’d also like to see if we can’t change the name of I-95, to call it an “Interstate Highway Park,” and I think we should have a few “Cell Tower Parks” and “Water Tower Parks,” don’t you? Perhaps that strip of the highway that runs past downtown Bridgeport, CT, can be rechristened a “Billboard Park” — to avoid any confusion about its true purpose.
Perhaps wind turbine noise should be renamed “Wind Turbine Mood Music.”
We could refer to the individual wind turbines as “Gleaming Energy Independence Mobiles.”
From: Eric Bibler, President, Save Our Seashore (Wellfleet, MA)
To: NY Times
Date: 10-7-10
Re: “For Those Near, The Miserable Hum of Clean Energy,” by Tom Zeller, Jr.
Re: “Huge Wind Turbine Farm Opens Off Coast of England,” by Julie Werdigier
I am writing to raise further objections to your reporting on wind turbines in recent articles that appeared in the New York Times, including the two captioned above.
Your reporting on this topic is habitually so uninformed and so superficial –- constantly repeating the same errors and evincing the same formulaic treatment of the issues –- that it is hard to know where to begin.
Therefore, let me first offer some general criticisms before getting to the specific shortcomings in these articles:
Every article that appears in the New York Times –- without fail –- takes the efficacy of wind energy as a given.
This is a gross failure which completely ignores the core question about an industrial policy which is being pursued at breakneck speed, which is more heavily subsidized than any other industry in the history of our country, which has a profound effect upon our physical environment and our daily lives, and which is absorbing a staggering flow of taxpayer dollars and user surcharges. Your reluctance to address the core question about this technology –- does it actually work? –- is appalling and irresponsible.
“Wind Turbine Syndrome” is of course a symptom of a larger malaise—humanity’s largely dysfunctional relationship with planet Earth. Wearing a mantle of righteousness, wind energy has acquired the messianic urgency of a religion whose goal is to forestall the Armageddon called Global Warming.
It makes for a powerful and bracing morality tale. Except for one problem. Wind energy and its massively proliferating, spinning cruciform turbines may well be, alas, overblown—like every other messiah who’s come down the pike since the dawn of civilization.
If you’re interested in the larger debate over mankind’s broken relationship with planet Earth—a debate featuring wind energy as a key player—you will be interested in a provocative new book by prize-winning historian, Calvin Luther Martin. (Yes, Nina Pierpont’s husband.)
While Nina burns the midnight oil figuring out the whys and wherefores of Wind Turbine Syndrome, Calvin ransacks history, trying to figure out how humanity got into such a mess that turbines—as evangelicals are wont to say of Jesus—are “the answer.” Retired Rutgers University professor, winner of the American Historical Association’s “best book of the year” (Beveridge) award, former Guggenheim and NEH Senior Fellow, and prolific author—Martin has just published “The Great Forgetting.”
—Barry Funfar, Falmouth, MA (10/1/10)
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This should be a required event for all public officials, the majority of whom are caught up in the “green mania” of the times, and are mindlessly promoting what they consider to be clean, green wind energy. They do this to the detriment of the health and well being of those exposed to industrial sized wind turbines with inadequete setbacks.
I speak from bitter experience. I, too, was “green” at one time. No more. I now live 1662 feet from Falmouth’s turbine #1. Before the turbine was built, I was very much concerned about the potential noise (knowing my sensitivities), but after going on the Falmouth Energy tour and visiting the wind turbine in Hull, MA, my fears were put to rest.
To: NY Times Fact Checking Department
From: Eric Bibler, President, Save Our Seashore, Wellfleet, MA
Re: “For Those Near, The Miserable Hum of Clean Energy”
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Dear New York Times Fact Checking Department,
I object to your newspaper’s lazy, inaccurate and blanket characterization of wind turbines as “a clean alternative” — perpetuating the myth that wind turbines can substitute for conventional electricity and provide an environmentally benign alternative. You do a gross disservice to your readers by perpetually applying such words as “clean,” “renewable,” “environmentally sensitive,” “sustainable” and “alternative” to these technologies uncritically, without even the most cursory examination or explanation of the limits of such power –- or the degree to which such claims are routinely inflated and taken at face value.
You should know better. If you don’t know better, you should get busy and start researching the fundamental limitations of these technologies so that you can avoid repeating this same error –- over and over again –- and so that you can avoid giving the NY Times “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” to a set of fallacies that is assiduously repeated and promoted by wind developers.
There is no reason to believe that the constant repetition of such fallacies is any more honorable when the NY Times engages in it than when the same practice is followed by such “media” organs as Fox News.
Here are some substantive facts of life that you rarely, if ever, report and that you never bother to reiterate in the context of stories like your recent story on Vinalhaven, Maine (a story with which I am very familiar):
—Tom Zeller, Jr, NY Times 10/5/10
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VINALHAVEN, Me. — Like nearly all of the residents on this island in Penobscot Bay, Art Lindgren and his wife, Cheryl, celebrated the arrival of three giant wind turbines late last year. That was before they were turned on.
“In the first 10 minutes, our jaws dropped to the ground,” Mr. Lindgren said. “Nobody in the area could believe it. They were so loud.”
Now, the Lindgrens, along with a dozen or so neighbors living less than a mile from the $15 million wind facility here, say the industrial whoosh-and-whoop of the 123-foot blades is making life in this otherwise tranquil corner of the island unbearable.
They are among a small but growing number of families and homeowners across the country who say they have learned the hard way that wind power — a clean alternative to electricity from fossil fuels — is not without emissions of its own.
Lawsuits and complaints about turbine noise, vibrations and subsequent lost property value have cropped up in Illinois, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, among other states. In one case in DeKalb County, Ill., at least 38 families have sued to have 100 turbines removed from a wind farm there. A judge rejected a motion to dismiss the case in June.
If you watch no other video on this site, watch this one. Watch the entire film. It was shot by a resident of Manvers, Ontario, on 9/30/10, at a public meeting where the wind developer was expected to explain to the community its plans to industrialize their township. (Section 2 of Ontario’s “Green Energy Act” requires wind developers to consult with the community before industrializing it. Was this belligerent, ham-handed spectacle the developer’s effort at “community consultation”?)
This bullying is happening more and more often in Ontario. As you watch the video, notice the exchange between the hired goons (one of them being a woman) and a bearded man, who admonishes them, “Don’t f–k with me!” That man, being menaced by these people, is a town councilor!
Notice the still images, below the video.
Now watch “Enraged in Ontario!” to see and hear what went on at this farce, once it got fully underway.
Manvers, Ontario (9/30/10)
