The wind industry is dangerous to human health, posing risks to everything from dizziness and nausea to chronic stress and heart conditions
A Canadian court will soon decide if wind turbines violate Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms by posing a risk to human health. Charter case decisions can be convoluted but the fundamental question of health at issue here is straightforward. Wind turbines, from all that is today known and by any rational measure, represent a risk to those living in their vicinity. Continue reading Financial Post – Lawrence Solomon: Ill winds blow from wind turbines→
[NATURALLY GREEN signs. Due to strong demand, we have ordered new signs, which are now available for purchase. For pickup in the Picton area, phone 613-476-2700; South Marysburgh, 613-476-7310; Wellington, 613-399-2407, Ameliasburgh, 613-962-6902 .]
At the beginning of May, CCSAGE NATURALLY GREEN took ads in local County papers and on CountyLive to point out existing legal rights to claim compensation if the construction of industrial wind turbine factories cause adverse effects to the value of businesses and properties.
Within three weeks, almost 400 County business and property owners indicated they would consider bringing such claims.
What did we do with this overwhelming response?
On June 4th, we wrote to the Premier, the Ministers of Energy and the Environment, the leaders of the two opposition parties and the Presidents of Gilead Power and wpd Canada Corporation. Below is a copy of our letter for your information. You can read a copy of…
If you love Motorcycles, Port Dover was the place to be yesterday for the Friday the 13th bike rally. Thousands flocked to the community town, driving past the surrounding Wind Turbines of the area. Port Dover bike shop owner Chris Simons held the first rally on Nov. 13, 1981. It was intended to be a gathering of friends, but soon grew by word of mouth.
The Mothers had amazing Friday the 13th custom Pottery mugs for sale which our local artists Anita and Mark Thornton donated for the event! The Trees not Turbines campaign along with our Raffle Ticket sales were also promoted! It was a good opportunity for us to get the message out to people that might not regularly hear much about the impacts of Industrial Wind Turbines. Thank you to all the volunteers who helped out at the event and especially to our own Linda Rogers for coordinating! Not only were we out informing the public, but fun times were had by all!!!
Raffle Tickets to Raise $$$ To Fight NRWC Project.
Mothers Against Wind Turbines Inc are selling Raffle Tickets in Conjunction with the Wainfleet Ratepayers Association to Raise Money for the Fight Against the NRWC Turbines and to helpBurnaby Skydive with their Legal Bills.
The tickets are $2 each or 3 for $5.
The first prize is a minimum of $500 or 12% of the proceeds, whichever is greater. Draws will be made for second and third prizes as well.
The parents of autistic children have particular fears about the effects turbines and high voltage pylons may have on their quality of life.
Fears: Neil van Dokkum and his son Ian moved to Kilmacthomas, Co Waterford, in search of a peaceful environment Photo: Patrick Browne
Protest: Jenny Spittle wants to protect daughter Billie. Pic: James Flynn
Whenever Jenny Spittle’s children visit their grandad in England, 12-year-old Billie comes home tired, complaining of headaches, earache, dizziness and hearing buzzing noises. Billie has autism and her mother is convinced her symptoms are brought on by the towering pylons and wind turbines located near her grandfather’s house. Now Jenny lies awake at night worrying about plans to build a wind farm close to her home in Co Westmeath.
“I see what she’s like after a week with her grandfather and wonder how she’ll cope if we have these things on our doorstep,” she says.
Like many autistic children, Billie is hyper-sensitive to sound and light. She hears sounds at frequencies that are inaudible to most people, and Jenny is afraid she will find the sound of wind turbines close to home intolerable.
“It’s not easy raising an autistic child, yet while I’m busy trying to organise psychotherapy, speech and language, occupational therapy and all the other kinds of supports she needs to help her cope with everyday life, I also have to make time to protest against pylons and wind turbines,” she says. “I can’t afford to wait until they’ve been built to voice my objections. I have to protect my child.”
Thirteen years ago, university lecturer Neil van Dokkum and his wife Fiona moved from South Africa to an idyllic part of Waterford with their two sons. Their youngest, Ian, had been diagnosed with autism and part of the reason for choosing to make their home in such a remote location was to give Ian the peaceful environment they felt he needed in which to thrive. Then, six months ago, Neil heard about the proposed construction of pylons in the area from a neighbour. The news set off alarm bells for him and his family.
“Ian is incredibly sensitive to electric noise and certain types of light,” he says. “He will start crying and become very agitated. It is a source of emotional trauma for him. My wife and I discovered the extent of this sensitivity when we installed energy-saving light bulbs in our kitchen. When Ian walked in, he put his fingers into his ears, screwed his face up tight and said: ‘Blue light off, please Daddy. Blue light off!’ I was sitting directly under the light and had not noticed anything. Ian was standing at the door, about four metres away, and he couldn’t bear it. Can you imagine how he will be affected by pylons carrying 400kV power lines? Like many other parents of autistic kids and indeed children with other intellectual disabilities, we deliberately moved to the country so as to be away from the city with its high levels of ambient noise, including electrical noise, and disturbance. At night, it can be so quiet here that I can hear the cows crunching grass in the field opposite. Can you imagine how that silence will be shattered by clanking pylons? More specifically, how my son’s silence will be shattered by the electrical noise coming from those cables? How will he be able to sleep with that noise? And how will the rest of my family sleep as Ian becomes highly agitated when awakened by this distressing noise?
“The other concern I have is flight risk. Ian, like many autistic children, has no sense of danger and will run away and on to the road at any opportunity. He is not running away from anything, but sometimes seems to feel the need to rush into an open space. Again, the countryside, with its minimal traffic and quieter roads, is far safer than a city with all those vehicles. Even so, my property is fenced and gated, not to keep people out, but rather to keep my son in and safe.
My deepest fear now is that the electrical noise coming off cables and pylons will disturb him so much that he will attempt to run from it. And if he can’t get out, he will bang his head against the wall out of sheer frustration. The potential consequences are too painful to even contemplate, and if the proposed construction of pylons across the countryside goes ahead, selling our house would be impossible, so we are effectively trapped.
“If the Government were to abandon its slavish adulation of the wind industry and pursue the biomass option, converting Moneypoint power station to biomass boilers, it could save over three billion euro. Imagine how many state-of-the-art facilities for people with intellectual disabilities could be built with that sort of money.”
A Department of Health spokesperson says: “According to international literature, no direct health effects have been demonstrated in persons living in close proximity to wind turbines. However, it is agreed that there is a need for additional, well-designed studies in this area. The Department of Health advises that anyone who believes they are experiencing any health problems should consult their GP promptly.”
In its draft development plan, Westmeath County Council required any new wind farm development to implement a setback distance of 10 times the height of the turbine from residential dwellings, but the Department of the Environment intervened. Under Objective PWin6 of the plan, a turbine measuring 180m, for instance, would be sited at least 1.8km away from any house, while according to the Department’s wind energy guidelines, a distance of 500m is deemed sufficient. Minister of State for Planning Jan O’Sullivan wrote to the council instructing it to re-examine the setback distance.
“We received over 5,600 submissions from constituents who supported PWin6, which would have kept the setback distance in place,” says Westmeath County Council chairman Peter Burke. “We informed the Minister of State that we felt the Department’s guidelines were not adequate and she appointed an inspector to carry out an independent review.”
Last month, that inspector’s report recommended against the inclusion of the PWin6 objective on the grounds that it “would be contrary to section 28 of the Planning and Development Act 2000.”
At the time of writing, the Department’s final decision on the matter is pending.
Safety first: Are turbines and pylons dangerous?
Now that Ireland’s plan to export wind energy to Britain has been scrapped, the public has been left a little breathing space to focus on a simple question: Are wind farms and their related pylons and overhead power lines safe or not?
The Department of Health’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Dr Colette Bonner, has said that older people, people who suffer from migraine, and others with a sensitivity to low-frequency vibration, are some of those who can be at risk of ‘wind turbine syndrome’.
“These people must be treated appropriately and sensitively as these symptoms can be very debilitating,” she commented in a report to the Department of the Environment last year. We asked Dr Bonner for clarification.
“Presently the World Health Organisation does not classify Wind Turbine Syndrome as a disease under the WHO international classification of diseases,” she said. “Current research in the area suggests that there are no direct health effects of wind turbines. However, there are methodological limitations of many of the studies in this area and more high quality research is recommended.”
Side by side with the controversy over wind farms comes concern over the high voltage pylons which distribute the electricity generated by the wind turbines to the national grid. Chief Medical Officer in the Deptartment of Health, Dr Tony Holohan, has stated that he does not think there is a health risk associated with people living in vicinity of pylons.
But not everybody agrees; according to British physicist Denis Henshaw, people have every reason to be concerned. Emeritus professor of human radiation effects at Bristol University and scientific director of the charity Children with Cancer UK, he recently told a public health meeting in Trim, Co Meath, that high voltage power cables are linked “beyond reasonable doubt” to childhood leukaemia and other diseases.
“It has been shown again and again that there is a definite risk of childhood leukaemia and other diseases near these lines,” he says. “The link is so strong that when a childhood leukaemia occurs near these lines there is a greater than 50pc chance that the leukaemia is due to the line. This raises the prospect of legal action for corporate manslaughter against those involved in putting the line there. The Irish government and EirGrid need to take care of their citizens and acknowledge the known health risks in people near these lines.”
A spokesman for EirGrid says: “We’re not doctors, but having taken advice from experts at the World Health Organisation, along with the chief science adviser and the chief medical officer, it is clear to us that there is no evidence to link overhead lines with adverse health effects.”
The Government report ‘Health Effects of Electromagnetic Fields’ 2007 says: “Given that there is still uncertainty about whether long-term exposure to extremely low frequency magnetic fields could cause childhood leukaemia, use of precautionary measures to lower people’s exposure would therefore appear to be warranted.
“As a precautionary measure, future power lines and power installations should be sited away from heavily populated areas to keep exposures to people low.”
After looking on the IESO website this morning as I sometimes do…I decided to share with my fellow wind warriors the actual output of Wind as of 6am this morning.
With a Wind CAPACITY of 1725MW and only actually using 159MW…we are still paying companies NOT TO PRODUCE!
This reflects the TINY 1% of our energy being generated by WIND this morning as of 6am!
So let me get this straight, we are PAYING companies NOT TO PRODUCE so that we can have 1% of our energy supplied….
Couldn’t we have made up the 1% through NUCLEAR, HYDRO or GAS???
YES WE CAN!!
How much have we WASTED on subsidies for this TINY amount of Energy????
It is going to hurt all of our families for generations to come!
As of 6am this morning, the total energy make up is 1% WIND…..
May 14, 2009 will be a day that will surely go down in Ontario history. As 54 democratically elected Liberal and 5 NDP MPPs voted in favour of the Green Energy Act, a new era of government was ushered in. This huge piece of legislation entailed the opening up and restructuring of 15 existing acts including the Environmental Protection Act, the Environmental Bill of Rights act, and the Public lands Act. One must ask why was such a massive and important piece of regressive legislation, that would remove the democratic rights of rural citizens and necessitate the bastardization of existing acts, be pushed through in a matter of days? Our own Auditor General expressed how the Ontario people are “Over-Paying” 2.7 Billion more than the market rate of electricity….how can we sit idly by allowing them to increase our rates to the highest rates anywhere in North America?
June 3, 2014 – Sun News – Straight Talk – Jerry Agar
SOUTH KENT WIND FARM NEAR LONDON, ONTARIO Credits: Mike Hensen/The London Free Press/QMI Agenc
It is heart wrenching to see and feel the pain of fellow Ontarians breaking down in tears as they explain how the Liberal government drove them from their homes.
But to understand how cold and callous our current political leadership is in this province, you need to experience it.
Rebecca Thompson’s documentary, Down Wind: How Ontario’s Green Dream Turned into a Nightmare (Surge Media Productions), airs on Sun News Wednesday at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.
It is a story of reckless, agenda-driven politics resulting in shattered lives.
The Ontario Liberal government’s Green Energy Act isn’t just an economic failure; it is an act of brutal indifference to the human cost of politics.
A cost ignored by people living far from the thump of the giant wind turbines, secure in their downtown Toronto homes and politically correct theories; a safe distance from places like Ripley, Clear Creek and Lucknow, Ontario.
Many may not care – worshiping as they do at the altar of so-called green energy – that the jobs promised by the Liberals through their Green Energy Act were never delivered, while the cost of hydro skyrocketed.
But the human cost should matter to us all.
Giant wind turbines, as high as 50 storeys, with blades the size of a 747, were foisted on communities in rural Ontario with no consultation or agreement from the residents, their municipal governments having been stripped of their planning powers by the Green Energy Act.
Unlike politicians who pay lip service to “serving others” while stomping all over people’s lives and looking after themselves, Norma Schmidt spent her life in Underwood, Ontario in the actual service of others as a nurse and instructor of future nurses.
She and her husband spent their lives in the home they lovingly restored over the years; a place they had hoped to share with their grandchildren.
But Norma has been forced out of her home by severe migraines and depression, brought on by the relentless noise and vibration from the industrial wind turbines erected practically in her back yard.
She left both the job and the home she loved, escaping to a room in her daughter’s house.
It is not the life she worked all these years to achieve, and it is not what she deserves.
Do Norma’s tears, and those of others similarly affected, fall to no effect at the feet of Premier Kathleen Wynne?
Norma’s story is one among many, some of them told in Down Wind.
This is the same Dalton McGuinty/Wynne Liberal government that used public money to reward violent aboriginal protesters who seized private property and terrorized people in Caledonia.
That “occupation” continues today and the government, knowing that their voting base in Toronto couldn’t care less about some rubes in the country, keeps the issue quiet by caving into thugs, rather than protecting law-abiding citizens.
Would the government be as forgiving to people across rural Ontario if some were to blow up a few of the industrial wind turbines that have made their lives hell? Of course not.
There are no turbines thumping the night away in Don Valley West or Toronto-Centre.
It remains to be seen whether the people in such ridings, who overwhelmingly voted Liberal in 2011, will care more for their fellow citizens in rural Ontario this time around.
There are any number of political parties to support other than the Liberals.
Mothers Against Wind Turbines Inc. 