The Mysterious Wind Turbine Syndrome That Doctors, Coroners, Public Health Agencies Don't See

[hatrack]

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What we are seeing across the midwest are social-media organized “flash mobs” showing up at normally-sleepy township planning commissions and shouting down, threatening and intimidating local boards who are not accustomed to organized ugliness. The scenes are very reminiscent of the anti-Obamacare “Keep the Government out of my Medicare” mobs of 2010, and generally just as poorly informed.

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Another is gathering attention; the very modern malaise known as wind turbine syndrome. I set out to collect the conditions attributed to wind farm exposure. Within hours, I’d found 50 often florid assertions about different illnesses. Today my total sits at 198, with a range redolent of Old Testament plagues. The list includes “deaths, yes, many deaths”, none of which have ever come to the attention of a coroner, cancers, congenital malformations, and every manner of psychiatric problem. But mostly, it includes common health problems found in all communities, with wind turbines or not. These include greying hair, energy loss, concentration lapses, weight gain and all the problems of ageing. Sleep problems are mentioned most, but insomnia is incredibly common. Animals get a look in. Chickens won’t lay; earthworms vanish; hundreds of cattle and goats die horrible deaths from “stray electricity”.

In a 35-year career in public health, I have never encountered anything quite so apocalyptic. I’ve visited wind farms and compared their gentle swoosh to the noises that all city dwellers live with daily. Quickly, this phenomenon began to tick psychogenic boxes. There are several reasons to suspect that the unrecognised entity of wind turbine syndrome is psychogenic: a “communicated” disease spread by anti-wind interest groups, sometimes with connections to fossil fuel interests. People can worry themselves sick.

Firstly, there are the temporal problems. Wind farms appeared some 20 years ago in the US. There are now just shy of 200,000 turbines globally. But the first recorded claims that they caused disease came a decade later. Two rural doctors, one in the UK and the other in Australia, made claims repeated widely in newspapers but never published in any journal. Turbines have come to be blamed for chronic conditions like (amazingly) lung and skin cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and stroke. But importantly also acute symptoms, that according to Australia’s high priestess of wind turbine syndrome, Sarah Laurie, an unregistered doctor, can commence within 20 minutes of exposure. If true, what happened in the early complaint-free years?

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https://climatecrocks.com/2018/12/23/defending-the-wind/#more-54689

[Achilleaze]

1. Derangement

[Danmel]

2. Wind turbines spread the chemtrails

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

3. And turn the frogs gay

[Marie Marie]

4. I think I have a better explanation for all these maladies...

Republicans.

[N_E_1 for Tennis]

5. Wind turbines cause birds...

To say “what the flock”.

Sorry very little humor. My nephew works setting up wind turbines, his joke. He does most of his work inside the blades. You should see inside they’re huge.

[sweetloukillbot]

6. And screaming coyotes climbing trees

At least that's what I read here...

[marked50]

7. So that's where Wiley went?-n/t

[FreepFryer]

8. Ummmmm

https://gph.is/2B8dfFm

[Merlot]

9. Someone once told me that wind turbines kill birds

and that therefore we shouldn't allow them. I told them that climate change will kill more birds than wind turbines.

Funny the arguments they will use, when you know they probably have no problem with poultry farms - now, those birds are ment to die, right?

[Liberty Belle]

10. Don't be so quick to judge,

unless you have lived near these.

We have several in our area (though I don't personally live near them).

I do know personally many of the people whose health has been negatively impacted. These are intelligent, sane people. One chairs a planning board and is one of the brightest people I know. Another is a photographer who has done freelance work for me for many years, winning awards. Some of these people were applauded by liberals when they helped stand up to Blackwater and stop Blackwater's plans to turn a rural valley into a paramilitary camp.

I can't vouch for every person and every claim. But I am convinced that some are real. There are issues of noise, sleep disruption, blade flicker, flashing lights that shine in people's windows, and more.

One Indian tribe began to have high rates of cancer of a type associated with proximity to high voltage power lines. They had an expert come out and take measurements. Turns out there was stray voltage from a wind farm 1,000 times higher than normal coming up through the floors of their homes. In one household even a 2-year-old boy had abdominal cancer. This is not normal.

This is the area where previously some had told of animals fleeing the fields or climbing trees. The voltage is so strong from the ground that it can be felt. Some describe it as small shocks. So it's logical that animals would feel that too and try to run away or act strangely.

Some have been large birds of prey's carcasses hauled off in wheelbarrows from one of the wind farms on tribal land. The new ones on public land are even larger and large birds seem to have disappeared there. The turbines are 500 feet tall -- high as a 50 story building.

Little known fact: They also contain about 1,000 gallons each of flammable lubricating oil -- and they built them in a very high fire danger area, with no fire truck with a ladder tall enough to fight a fire there. .There is one foam truck in the region, stored a half hour away. The turbines line a valley that's only one way in and out. If it becomes blocked by fire, hundreds of people could die.

So these are not benign. There are some areas where they are fine, if far enough away from homes and sensitive wildlife preserves. Some of the areas where they put them here were not fine, and in the case of the stray voltage, it would be fixable if anyone would make the tribe that owns the land do the right thing to protect its neighbors, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs doesn't seem to care. The same wind farm also had a turbine explode into flames and start a brush fire; thankfully it was winter and not the dry season when Santa Ana winds would have made it into an inferno. As it was, it nearly burned down a couple of nearby homes.

There was also an explosion where all of the wind farms went off line another time and were down for 3 months. There were lawsuits and turbine blades/parts littered the ground for a couple of years.

At another local wind farm, an 11 ton blade fell off onto a public trail. Another turbine collapsed completed. Thank God it was during the night and nobody was nearby to be killed. That one also has recurrent Dust Bowl type storms now because all the topsoil on 12,000 acres was stripped bare to build the wind farm. I have photos to document this and residents say it never happened there before. They also sprayed a flammable chemical for dust suppression after complaints and then it washed into flash floodwaters and coated front yards across the entire town with a white, flammable powder.

Our publication has won many awards from prominent journalism organizations for reporting on these problems, all thoroughly documented.

Talk about a "flash mob." What we see is a group of posters who support the wind industry (and the wind turbine companies here are owned by big oil and utility companies). This group posts comments in style similar to the Russian trolls all over the internet, attacking even the most reputable and well documented reports of harm associated with wind turbines. They attacked our reports and ignored the facts.

We used to see this sort of attack against anyone who warned about potential dangers of nuclear power plants, too. We now know how dangerous they can be.

Yes, we definitely need clean, green power. Global warming/climate change is real and threatens mankind. But most forms of solar are a far better means of producing renewable energy in areas that have enough sunshine. The places I'm talking about are in southern California, in desert and high desert climates where this did not have to happen. Rural people deserve a decent quality of life and so does wildlife. It should not be destroyed when there are better, safer clean and green alternatives.

[safeinOhio]

11. They are for "clean" coal instead?

Township just north of me wanted to stop the windmills. Signs everywhere, in front of every farm. I thought they would, for sure, stop the turbines

Turns out they would have to set up a township zoning commission and not be able to use the county board as they had always done. Then it turns out that would include a large increase in property taxes to pay for the new board. The township ban on windmills lost big.

[aka-chmeee]

12. So at last, we know what killed the dinosaurs!

Voltages lower than 1/10th of the lowest common voltage used for distribution throughout the world!

[many a good man]

13. Dissenters need to learn a foreign language

I chuckled at this excerpt:

Then there’s the issue of clustering. The European wind industry sees the phenomenon as largely anglophone, and even then, only in particular regions and around certain farms.

Funny that only Brits, Aussies, and Yanks are complaining. Seriously though, the industry needs to develop best practices for safety guideline and they need to be enforced. Don't erect turbines overhanging hiking trails. Protect from fires. Capture stray voltage. Etc.

[hunter]

14. It's difficult to say which fantasy is worse...

... that wind turbines cause mysterious illnesses, or that they will displace fossil fuels in any significant way.

I personally see them as giant greenwashing machines and long term commitment to natural gas power plants.