The Nightmare of Industrial Wind Turbines Continues- The Other Side of The Story
What is in our well water?
“The people whose well water has apparently been impacted during and following the construction of Industrial Wind Turbines in our part of Chatham-Kent need to know if their drinking water is actually safe to drink, cook with and to use for bathing as well as feed to their fuzzy friends and livestock. Your financial assistance will make this possible.”
Christine Burke
Please consider making a donation at: Gofundme
My name is Christine Burke and I’ve been married to my husband Terry for 39 years. We live in a rural century home in the former Township of Dover, now part of the municipality of Chatham-Kent, in Ontario. Terry was born and raised in our home as was his father, Wayne. Grampa and Gramma lived to the ages of 99 and 94 drinking, cooking, bathing and laundering with their crystal-clear well water that is sourced from the thousands-of-years-old aquifer that underlies much of Chatham-Kent. We raised our children with the same water, from the same well.
Then in 2009, Boralex started construction on top of this “highly vulnerable aquifer” and between 2012 and 2013, fifty-five more Industrial Wind Turbines were constructed in Dover by GDF Suez (now Engie Canada) and at that time our well water turned black. We are not the only family that had their well water impacted in the same way. The discoloration and increased turbidity of our well water and that of other families is due to an increased amount of very fine-grained sediment within the water. The presence of that sediment was, and remains extremely worrisome from a health perspective because it is known to include a component of very fine clay- and silt-sized particles that are likely derived from a metals-rich black shale.
Because of what had happened in Dover we warned our municipal and provincial governments that if the thirty-four wind turbines of the proposed North Kent 1 Industrial Wind Complex were permitted to be built in 2017, on the same aquifer that was impacted in Dover, more families in Chatham-Kent were going to experience interference with their well water resulting in the presence of metals-rich sediment. And sadly, it happened just as we said it would, just as we predicted. It was a heartbreaking experience to wait, watch and witness families as they saw the quality and possibly the potability of their well water destroyed during the construction and operation of yet more Industrial Wind Turbines.
On May 5, 2018, the Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, promised in writing a Health Hazard Investigation of well water which was then reduced to an All Hazard Investigation, two different protocols. In the end, the All Hazard Investigation was confined to the North Kent 1 Industrial Wind Complex and we, the impacted families living in Dover and within the footprint of the earlier Industrial Wind developments, were excluded.
Furthermore, the Investigation in North Kent 1 failed at one of its primary objectives which was to sample and analyze the sediment that is causing the discoloration and turbidity of the water from many wells and that is known to contain potentially toxic substances.
The Expert Panel that advised the All Hazard Investigation explicitly recommended, in its Report, that further studies of the well water should be carried out including the analysis of the sediment contained therein. To this date, no elected official or government agency has indicated their intention to sample and analyze the sediment.
In the absence of any government action upon the recommendation of the Expert Panel to analyze sediment from well water, our household proceeded to have such work done on a sample taken from our own well. With the help of friends, family and some people we have never met, we had sediment from our well water analyzed at an accredited laboratory. The results indicate that the particles of clay- and silt-sized sediment (not “sand”, as previously stated by Chatham-Kent’s Medical Officer of Health, Dr. David Colby) contains concentrations of potentially toxic metals including Antimony, Arsenic, Barium, Cadmium, Lead and Nickel.
Those results are especially alarming because we, and other residents are not able to filter the extremely fine, clay- and silt-sized metals-rich particles from our domestic water supplies.
Our concern is that there may be other rural residents drinking, cooking or bathing with well water that might contain similar, potentially toxic sediment. They may also be feeding it to their pets and/or livestock thinking it to be safe. It is urgent that more households carry out the type of analyses we recently completed in order to make informed decisions on the quality of their domestic water supply.
The laboratory analysis, approximately US$685 per sample, along with the additional expense of an accredited hydrogeologist to retrieve the water samples, represents an expense that is beyond the reach of many families. Therefore, we hope to raise funds to help other residents to defray all or part of the costs of analyses for potentially toxic metals in their domestic water supply.
With your donation, we can follow through with the crucial analytical work that our governments have failed to do. The people whose well water has apparently been impacted during and following the construction of Industrial Wind Turbines in our part of Chatham-Kent need to know if their drinking water is actually safe to drink, cook with and to use for bathing as well as feed to their fuzzy friends and livestock. Your financial assistance will make this possible.
Thank you so very much for any help you can provide.
Following is a link to a slide show providing background information on the water well situation in Chatham-Kent.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pQYzyJQvACv3nrxC72bEnftlyS3giiNO/view?usp=sharing
Health Hazard Exists
Presentation to the Eastern Ontario Health Unit Board of Directors’ public meeting on August 18, 2022 by Ruby Mekker and Tammy McRae.
Fighting against reported adverse impacts from wind facilities.
Nation Rise Wind, North Stormont, Ontario, Canada
HEADWIND”21 a film by Marijn Poels
When the crisis became a business
Former London banker Alexander Pohl worked for years for one of the world’s greenest banks. Idealistically driven he financed big wind and solar farms genuinely convinced he was making the world a better place.
Gradually he woke up to the fact that today’s green is actually an ego-driven, corrupt, and broken system. He gave up banking and emigrated with his family to his little forest paradise in remote, northern Sweden. The dream was to get back to Nature, start an eco-farm and put as much distance as he could between his family and the industrialization of nature.
Until….. A wind park was planned at the gates of his paradise garden.
Documentarian Poels and Alexander Pohl are taking the journey together…. to ask questions and unravel the green wonderland to its true core …
Testimony of Harm to Health 2022
Attached is our testimony of how we live with turbines 1700-1800 ft out our back door in Dekalb County Missouri.
Please feel free to share or read in meetings etc.
My husband and I live in Dekalb County Missouri, about 27 miles east of St. Joe. We built this home in 1998. One of our farms is where my husband was born and raised. He has lived in this county his entire life.
Nextera put a wind complex of 97 500 ft. industrial wind turbines in our county in 2016. They went online in December of 2016. Our lives have not been the same since.
Don’t we, as landowners have a right to live and enjoy our property without our rights being infringed upon by what neighbors have done with their property?
Our neighbor has a turbine approx. 1800 ft. from our home. Most of the time the turbines sound like a helicopter that won’t land. We not only hear the one close to our home but the 12 to 15 within 2 miles of our home.
I had not had a migraine for around 18 years prior to the turbines. When the turbines first went online, I started having headaches, I sometimes could tolerate them by taking Advil. The longer they turned the worse and more frequent the headaches got, to now I have a headache every day. Most weeks I am completely down 2 to 4 days with migraines. My ears feel as if I’m flying on a plane every day. The infra sound affects me some. When I try to sleep my insides will quiver until it’s almost unbearable. I have heart palpitations.
We neither one get much sleep. I might go to sleep, if I’m lucky, for an hour then I wake up. I’ll go back to sleep and wake up hearing the turbines or my heart racing, looking at the clock and I’ve only been asleep for 15 or 20 minutes. It’s like this every night all night long. My heart doctor told me in December 2018 that we really needed to move away from the turbines. A person can only function so long without the proper amount of sleep. I have to travel away from our home for a week or more to get any relief from the headaches and to get some peaceful sleep and have my ears feel normal again. We shouldn’t have to live like this! No one should have to live like this. It is criminal and inhumane for the wind companies to expect people to live like this. What bothers one person may not bother the next. Some people are much more sensitive to noise, different types of sounds and the strobe like flicker.
We should be able to sit on our front porch without the noise of the turbines. I can’t stand to have the windows open on a nice day because of that awful noise.
Shadow flicker is another thing. It can make you dizzy and nauseous. I try not to go to our nearby town when I know the shadow flicker is across the highway where I have to drive.
In the winter Billy and our employees shouldn’t have to worry about the ice throws from the turbines close to where they are working. No, the chunks of ice don’t always fall straight down like the wind companies tell you.
The wind companies will come in and tell you they will shut the turbines down during stormy weather or in the winter during snow or ice storms. They have never shut the ones down in our county for any of those things. In the spring of 2017 Dekalb county was in a tornado warning, however a lot of people had no idea because they no longer had antenna TV reception because of the turbines.
The flickering red lights is another thing. We feel like we live on a landing strip. It’s horrible.
If wind turbines are so great why are there so many people around the world fighting them and moving from their homes because of health issues?
Since I originally wrote this my health has only gotten worse.
Two years ago, we went to two different meetings in Kansas to tell our story. Of course, Nextera told the attorneys and board members they didn’t believe our story. We know how we have been forced to live. We don’t care if they believe us or not.
I recently went to a neurologist. When the nurse was checking me in and asking all the questions, I told her we lived and had turbines out our back door as close as 1700-1800 feet. She said “believe me we see several patients that have trouble living near the turbines.” The neurologist didn’t have anything good to say about the turbines. He said the only thing to do is to move.
We have now built a small apartment for me to escape to at my sisters (200 miles from our home). I have been in my apartment for over a year now. I will stay there for 3 weeks then come back to our house. I will stay anywhere from 2 to 6 weeks then leave again for my apartment. It takes me 5 ½ days or so to get over the headache, sleep and my ears kind of back to normal. This is a HELL of a way to be forced to live our “golden years” this way because of people being so GREEDY!
Sherrie Sonderegger
UPDATED: 08/17/2022
Story from Dekalb County Missouri|July 19, 2019|Written by: Sherrie Sonderegger
No recourse: Ontario’s green energy dream has turned into a nightmare
No recourse: Ontario’s green energy dream has turned into a nightmare|Ottawa Life Magazine, July 28, 2022|By: Mckenzie Donovan
“Wind farms are more than just an eye sore. Turbines also produce light pollution at night, as they are required to have bright lights to warn off aircraft. They taint the countryside with irritating noise and are causing or amplifying health problems such as insomnia and more severe issues, including hearing impairment and cardiovascular issues. In 2018, the European Environment Agency, based on information provided by the World Health Organization,stated that noise disturbance causes these health issues.”
READ ARTICLE HERE:
No recourse: Ontario’s green energy dream has turned into a nightmare
When the fiction of green energy met with the facts it led to misery for a North Stormont, Ontario family.
Wind Turbine Noise Impacts Ordinary Persons
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF VICTORIA AT MELBOURNE
COMMON LAW DIVISION
MAJOR TORTS LIST
No. S ECI 2020 00471
B E T W E E N
NOEL UREN and another
Plaintiffs
-and-
BALD HILLS WIND FARM PTY LTD
Defendant
Filed on: 08/10/2021
3. John Zakula is now in his seventh year of enduring the nuisance. The noise is so bad for him that he has bricked in his bedroom window and takes to sleeping in his car when he just cannot endure another night of sleeplessness. Mr Zakula — a qualified engineer — has meticulously logged the noise disturbances from the wind turbines year after year. But no matter how many letters he sent reporting the noise and deaf to the messages Mr Zakula left on the Defendant’s phone hotline complaining of the noise, the Defendant has not curtailed a single turbine in response to Mr Zakula’s particular complaints. Nor has it repaired the faulty gearboxes which affected its turbines, despite knowing of tonality defects for years and years.
~~~~~
10. …..First, there is evidence that nineteen neighbours were affected in a similar fashion to the Plaintiffs2 (Contrary to the Defendant’s Submissions,3 Mr Soler was one of the persons whose ability to sleep was affected.) Seven of those neighbours gave evidence in the proceeding. They presented as witnesses of ordinary fortitude. It was not put to them that they were hypersensitive. Save in the case of Mr Jelbart 4 it was not even put to them that their opposition to the wind farm might have affected their perception of the noise. On the balance of probabilities, it should be accepted that the seven neighbours’ evidence illustrated the effect of the wind farm noise on ordinary people. It is clear from the Plaintiffs’ lay witnesses and the complaints in the Defendants’ records that the Defendant’s turbines tend to be so noisy that they annoy neighbours during the day and frequently wake them up at night, particularly in cooler weather.
(Extracts and bold for emphasis)
Plaintiffs’ Closing Submission:
Switch to Wind or Solar? Good Luck with That
Niagara Regional Wind Exceeds Raptor Kills Threshold
Industrial wind facilities kill birds, bats and raptors. In Ontario part of the license requires the operator to count and submit a report to the Ministry about how many dead creatures they find. Niagara Wind exceeded the annual raptor mortality threshold in 2019.
“Based on the requirements of the MNRF guidelines (OMNR 2011) and the project’s Renewable Energy Approval (No. 4353-9HMP2R), all post-construction commitments pertaining to birds and bats have been met and no further bird or bat mortality monitoring is required for the Niagara Region Wind Farm. Any additional monitoring that may be
required as a result of the exceedance of the raptor mortality threshold at the NiagaraRegion Wind Farm will be determined in consultation with the MNRF.”
Read the report here:
Niagara Region Wind Farm 2019 Bird & Bat Mortality Monitoring
Blown Away: The People vs Wind Power
Esther Wrightman’s testimony and her tears will rip your heart out.
Wind Warriors rise from ongoing trauma due to the siting and operations of industrial wind complexes. We are still here and remain engaged in the fight of our lives.
(Video has been blocked over allegations of use of copyright material without consent)
Mothers Against Wind Turbines Inc. 