Wind Turbine Syndrome: “In their own words”

Congress just sent an $801 billion tax cut bill to President Obama for his signature. Obama will sign it into law. At the last minute, as a result of carpet-bombing lobbying and dire prophecies by the American Wind Energy Association, Democrats inserted language into the bill to extend the huge, absurd, direct federal subsidy for wind energy projects—guaranteeing Americans at least one more year of The Great Wind Energy Opera.

This means that you, dear reader, may wind up contemplating a wind turbine or two near your home, soon.

Should this happen, you’re doubtless going to hear (probably for the first time) the phrase “Wind Turbine Syndrome,” as your community debates this so-called “wind farm.” (It’s not a “farm”; it’s a major industrial plant.)

You will soon make an interesting connection. The people who have signed leases with the wind developers consider Wind Turbine Syndrome to be so much moonshine. As a Brewster, MA, town officer recently put it, “hogwash.” (Note: These “WTS = moonshine” experts signed those leases long before you were apprised of this whole project, but that’s a scandalous story for another day.)

Of course, the moonshine crowd has zero credentials, or, for that matter, any real knowledge of what Wind Turbine Syndrome in fact is. (Frankly, they wouldn’t know a syndrome from a Las Vegas hooker. Or a peer review from their pudenda.) They heard it’s moonshine from the wind developers—and that’s good enough for them.

But I digress. The point is, you’re looking down the barrel (a very large barrel!) of a wind turbine—maybe lots of them—and wondering if these things really, honest-to-god make people sick.

Short answer? Yes, they do. Sick enough that many either sell their homes (if they can), or they raise enough hell with the developer that the company (secretly) buys them out, or they abandon their home. (Lock the door and drive away. No kidding.)

Many more sit tight and suffer. And, since they haven’t read Pierpont, they can’t figure out why they’re getting pounding headaches and awakening at night in a panic, and why they feel like puking and get dizzy and have ringing (tinnitus) or pressure in their ears and feel like their insides are crawling, and—for the life of them—why they’re forgetting things, and can’t do many formerly mundane, simple tasks that require spatial thinking and spatial reasoning. (Um, early Alzheimer’s? Nope. Wind Turbine Syndrome.)

But you don’t want to hear it from me, right? You want to hear their beef in their own words, right? (Let’s call it the “unvarnished beef.”)

Pierpont gives it to you—yes, in their own words. Sixty-seven pages of it. Sixty-seven pages of what’s called, in medicine, “case histories.”

They look like this (click here).

Get Pierpont’s book and start reading those 67 pages.

In the remaining 230 pages, Pierpont explains the likely patho-physiology of their beef, which, incidentally, Big Wind (WIND) says is nothing more than, well, garden-variety hysteria. “They’re making it up,” in other words. WIND (“Why I Need Dollars”) calls it a “nocebo” effect. WIND seized on this risible explanation after it hired some shills to write a rebuttal to Pierpont’s research.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention. The big fight in this whole mess is between WIND and NIMBY. ”Why I Need Dollars” versus “Not In My Back Yard.” The WINDies want, um, the dollars, and for that they’re going to make all sorts of righteous speeches about “getting off Arab oil” and “global warming” and “doing our part” and “bringing home the troops” and “Wind Turbine Syndrome is bullshit” and “cats kill more birds than turbines” and “jobs jobs jobs” and “green economy” and so forth. You get the idea. The NIMBYs don’t want the turbines because they devastate their property value, industrialize the neighborhood, make many people seriously ill, do nothing for global warming and energy independence and the jobs are short-lived and wind energy raises your electricity bill, and so forth.

But I’ve digressed once more.

When you’re done reading the case histories, ponder this: Virtually everyone in these 67 pages moved out of their home. (Do people really, truly move out of their homes—or abandon them—over something they made up?)

Finally, this. There are thousands of people around the world who describe the identical cluster of symptoms—symptoms that started when the turbines went online, symptoms that disappear when people go away for several days, symptoms that reappear when people return home. Symptoms that steadily, insidiously worsen over time, because you can never “get used to” the patho-physiological jack-hammering of infrasound. (Sorry, my friend, the body just doesn’t work that way.)

Moonshine? You’ve got brains and you’ve got common sense and you’re an adult. You decide.