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