The Falmouth Experience: The Trouble With One Town’s Wind Turbine
Part One
FALMOUTH, Mass. — Standing on his home’s porch, Neil Anderson points through the thicket of trees in his front yard and across Blacksmith Shop Road towards one of his closest neighbors: A wind turbine.
“Right now we are 1,320 feet, which is one-quarter mile south of Wind One, which is Falmouth’s first wind turbine. It’s been online since April. And we’ve been trying to get it stopped since April,” Anderson says.
Wind One, as the turbine is officially called, is owned by the town of Falmouth and is located at the town’s wastewater treatment plant, where it stands 262 feet tall to the turbine’s hub. That’s about 10 feet taller than the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown. The blades extend just shy of 400 feet, which is about half the height of the John Hancock Building in Boston.
Jess Bidgood/WGBH
Wind 1 stands 262 feet tall in Falmouth. As many as 50 residents of the town have complained of the health effects the turbine’s noise and shadows have had on their lives.
When it was installed last spring, Anderson didn’t think Wind One would cause a problem. For 35 years, he’s owned and operated a passive solar company on Cape Cod.
The energy conservationist in Anderson considered wind power a good principle. He wasn’t alone — before the turbine switched on, Falmouth residents almost universally welcomed Wind One as a symbol of renewable energy and a way to keep taxes down.
“I was proud looking at it from this viewpoint — until it started turning,” Anderson said.
But now, as many as 50 people are complaining about the turbine and the noise it makes at different speeds. A dozen families are retaining a lawyer for that reason.
“It is dangerous. Headaches. Loss of sleep. And the ringing in my ears never goes away. I could look at it all day, and it does not bother me. It’s quite majestic — but it’s way too close,” Anderson said.
Neighbors say this isn’t a debate about a turbine ruining their view, and their goal is not compensation. Some just want it turned off at night.
But Anderson can’t compromise. “This house has been my hobby, my investment, and we love it out here. We will move if we have to. Because we cannot live with (the turbine). No, we cannot,” Anderson said.
Wind One is expected to save the town about $375,000 a year in electricity. Heather Harper, Falmouth’s acting town manager, says Falmouth owes about $5 million on the 1.65-megawatt turbine.
Harper said one of the challenges of running the turbine is that the type of sound some neighbors complain about — that low-level pulse — isn’t regulated by the state. “The times I have been there I do not experience the impact of the effect that the neighbors have expressed that they’ve experienced. But I do believe that they are experiencing something that is very real to them,” Harper said.
Jess Bidgood/WGBH
Neil Anderson and his wife keep a log of how the turbine affects them. It shows nights of disrupted sleeping, headaches, and even mood-swings.
David McGlinchey is with the non-partisan Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences in Plymouth, which provides science-based information to policy makers. McGlinchey says that while Wind One has generated complaints, other turbines of similar size, including a 1.8-megawatt turbine in Hull, have been mostly well-received.
“The existing peer-reviewed studies suggest that there are no health effects associated with the sound and noise from wind turbines,” McGlinchey said. “That being said, people clearly experience symptoms. People have headaches, people have their sleep disturbed, people are not living well next to them in some situations. In some situations they are. So, both sides are right.”
Wind advocates say Falmouth’s experience has made it nearly impossible to get other turbines approved on Cape Cod, and potentially across the state. Last week, Falmouth’s selectmen acknowledged the issue and agreed to turn off the turbine when wind speeds exceed 23 miles per hour.
It’s unclear how much relief this will bring or how long it will last, since selectmen said more permanent mitigation efforts still must be negotiated.
One looming concern of neighbors is a second turbine, one of the same size and make that has gone up not far from the first. Falmouth’s Wind Two is scheduled to be turned on sometime this spring.
Part Two
FALMOUTH, Mass. — Last September, under the cover of darkness, Barry Funfar set out on an act of civil disobedience. His target was a wind turbine the town installed about 1,600 feet from his Falmouth home. Funfar used sticky-backed letters and a large poster-board to vandalize a welcome sign near the turbine’s base. When he was done, the new sign read, “The Noise from This Turbine is Killing Me.” And the word “killing” was in red, and he signed his name with a thick black marker.
“I had this huge foam board and covered the whole thing. I used gorilla tape to make it hard to take off. I figured the police would be up to my house the next morning or something. But I heard nothing,” Funfar said.
Dozens of people living near the 1.65-megawatt turbine have reported sleep interruptions, headaches and vertigo since it was turned on last April. Neighbors say it’s like sea sickness — some people feel it, others don’t. But the effects seem to be cumulative in that symptoms appear and increase the longer they’re near the turbine.
What’s not clear is why. A town-commissioned sound study concluded the turbine produces broad spectrum sound at levels within town and state guidelines. But residents say it’s not the volume as much as the type of sound that’s the problem.
Jess Bidgood/WGBH
The Andersen family logged feelings of sadness and anger, which they chalk up to the presence of the turbines.
“I’ve learned it’s just a different kind of noise. It’s like it gets inside of me and just causes so much stress and anxiety that even when it isn’t going I have this fear of when it is going to start up again,” Funfar said.
Residents primarily report three different types of turbine noise (all of which we were unable to record on our visits to the turbine). The first and most easily understood noise is a swooshing sound that’s made at regular intervals when the blades spin. Then, there’s another, more erratic sound, which some compare to a sneaker bouncing around in a drier.
Heather Goldstone says both of those noises are called impulse sounds, which scientists know are harder to get used to than constant sounds. But for reasons scientists don’t understand, wind turbine noise seems to be more disturbing than other noises such as airports and highways.
“Many scientists and wind-energy advocates say that while people may become annoyed by turbine noise, annoyance is not considered a health impact from a clinical perspective. That said, chronic annoyance can build into stress, and stress could cause many of the symptoms people are complaining about,” Goldstone.
Goldstone cited the work of Dr. Michael Nissenbaum, a physician who has studied the impacts of two wind farms in Maine on nearby residents. “He told me he thinks there’s a more direct explanation: That sleep deprivation caused by turbine noise is taking a toll on people’s mental and physical health,” she said.
The residents who report being the most severely affected by Wind One blame low-frequency sound, often called infrasound, that is inaudible and controversial. They say it’s like a pulse that gets into their heads and makes their hearts race.
“People have different sensitivities to sound, particularly in the low-frequency range,” Goldstone says. “The question is whether sounds below a person’s hearing threshold can affect the ear in other ways and possibly lead to health impacts. Conventional wisdom says no, but a couple of recent studies say maybe. There’s just not enough science available to sort this out yet.”
Steven Clarke is the top wind expert in Governor Patrick’s administration. Clarke says he won’t downplay residents’ complaints. But it’s important to recognize that Falmouth is only one out of 26 turbines that have been installed in Massachusetts, including a half-dozen turbines similar in size and capacity to Wind One.
“Once you put that context around the Falmouth situation,” he says, “I think it becomes clear that we should look at this as a specific case and not generalize that wind energy in general is problematic.”
State leaders have heard complaints about the lack of science as town boards make decisions, and Clarke says the state is looking to partner with a scientific institution to further study turbine noise.
Part Three
FALMOUTH, Mass. — It’s just after 8 in the morning, and as a light show begins in the kitchen, Malcolm Donald goes over to his computer and fiddles with its music player.
“Well, is it time to put on Dancing Queen?” he asks. “You have to do something to make it a little more tolerable, and I’ve been putting on a little disco music.”
What just a few minutes ago was a well-lit kitchen now is filled with flashing light. The reason stands some 1,900 feet away in the form of a 400-foot wind turbine at the town’s waste water treatment plant called Wind One. Some neighbors allege the noise from the turbine is making them sick. Donald feels fine. But what he does have is this “shadow flicker,” which creates a strobe light effect on the neighborhood as the sun rises behind the moving blades.
“I don’t know why we should have to be exposed to this. Somebody’s put up a machine, we lived here 20 years, and now all of a sudden we have flashing lights in the morning,” said Donald.
The intense flashing can make reading, watching television and even having a conversation a challenge. A good analogy might be to imagine trying to read a book in a moving car as the sun flashes through the trees. Donald says that this time of year the flashing continues for about 30 minutes. Two years ago, that wouldn’t have been too much of a problem. But last year Donald and his wife installed a half-dozen new windows in the rear of the house in an effort to eat breakfast with the sunlight.
“We’ve just done major renovations, taken out some walls so we can live here and enjoy the sunshine. And now the sunshine is flashing at us,” Donald said.
Opponents of wind turbines typically give a wide range of reasons for opposing it. There’s talk about alleged human and animal health effects, questions about connecting to the electricity grid, and concerns about cost, industrial accidents, property values and general noise. David McGlinchey of the non-partisan Manomet Center for Conservation Studies in Plymouth says shadow flicker often is another source of concern, but more of an annoyance.
“As far as we know, there are no health affects related to flicker. On the other hand, if that’s your house and it’s occurring when you want to eat breakfast, it’s an impact. It’s a nuisance,” explains McGlinchey.
In recent wind debates on Cape Cod, there’s been confusion about shadow flicker. Some speakers have said it can cause health effects. And it’s not uncommon to hear claims that the flashing light can cause epileptic seizures. Heather Goldstone says that’s unlikely to be a problem in Falmouth.
“I’ve seen two studies that directly address whether shadow flicker from wind turbines can cause seizures and they both conclude that the only risk comes from small turbines that turn quickly enough to cause shadows to flicker at least three times per second. At their fastest, the blades on Falmouth’s Wind 1 interrupt the sunlight once every second and a half. It’s just not fast enough to be a risk,” Goldstone said.
The primary reason Malcolm Donald opposes Falmouth’s wind turbines is because his neighbors say sound from Wind One is making them sick. But even flicker, he says, is reason enough to stop wind projects near neighborhoods. To his aggravation, when he makes such a suggestion, the reaction he often gets from wind advocates is skepticism and indifference.
“‘You know, ‘Get over it. You’ll get used to it.’ It’s maddening. A certain small segment of the population shouldn’t have to sacrifice for the good of the entire community,” Donald argues.
Unlike noise complaints, the source and scope of which are highly debated, shadow flicker is an impact turbine developers say can be predicted by computer modeling, and often avoided or at least mitigated. But so far, Donald says he’s received little comfort from being advised to cover his windows, grow more trees in his yard and to keep his lights on in order to reduce the flicker.
Part Four
FALMOUTH, Mass. — Liz Argo is probably the best-known wind advocate and turbine consultant on Cape Cod. She’s been involved with proposals in Brewster, Dennis and at the high school on Nantucket. And for the past 10 years, Argo has been taking her video camera along to interview people who live and work near turbines. She says the responses are almost always positive.
Argo stands a few hundred yards from a 156-foot tall wind turbine as she interviews Diana Duffly, treasurer of Hyannis Country Garden, the first business to put up a turbine on Cape Cod.
“Why don’t you start looking at it and turn back to me and tell me, ‘Since we put it in we had this issue, that issue, this good thing, that bad thing…” Argo says.
Jess Bidgood/WGBH
Wind One rises up over the trees in one Falmouth neighborhood, creating a shadow-flicker that has caused neighbors there to complain. Other Falmouth residents report health problems caused by the turbine’s noise.
Duffly begins: “We installed the turbine, it went online in 2009.”
But since that installation two years ago, Argo says the wind debate has shifted on the Cape. “What happened in Falmouth has very definitely made doing any well-sited wind project nearly impossible right now on Cape Cod,” Argo said.
Last spring, the town of Falmouth turned on the first of two 400-foot turbines at its wastewater treatment plant in a quiet, wooded area of west Falmouth. And, almost immediately, some residents began to complain. Neighbors say noise from the turbine causes headaches and wakes them up at night.
Argo and members of a wind advocacy group called the Cape and Islands Wind Information Network were skeptical, and they went to talk to the neighbors. “Meeting with those people quite honestly blew our minds,” Argo said. “We had expected that they would be kind of wacky. And we would be able to dismiss them. And none of us will dismiss their complaints now.”
As communities on Cape Cod consider wind proposals, and a county-wide planning committee considers new siting standards, Falmouth has loomed large in the discussions. Before the 1.65-megawatt turbine was turned on, there were virtually no Cape Codders with experience living near a turbine of that size. Turbine complaints came from mostly far-off places such as Europe and New Zealand. Now people from Falmouth have their own experiences, and their stories are impacting debates in other communities.
Barry Funfar lives about 1,600 feet from Falmouth’s turbine. He says he travels to other towns to talk about the aches and the pressure he feels in his head when outside in his yard. “When I went up to Plymouth, I said, I kind of feel like Paul Revere coming up here to warn you what it is like living by one of these,” Funfar said.
Wind advocates like Argo seem to be distancing themselves from the Falmouth project. While they point out that the turbine is an older one that was in storage for several years, they question its location just a few hundred yards from neighbors. “What went wrong in Falmouth I think, unfortunately, (is that) those turbines probably didn’t belong in that neighborhood,” Argo said.
If Argo is the most recognized pro-wind advocate on Cape Cod, then Eric Bibler, of the group WINDWISE, is likely the most visible opponent. Bibler says that what’s happening in Falmouth could happen in any town. And that the response to Falmouth should not be to simply call it an anomaly. “What we constantly hear in these other projects is this is not about Falmouth, that Falmouth is unique,” Bibler said. “That Falmouth is bad technology.”
Last week, Falmouth officials told neighbors they’re willing to shut off the turbine when winds hit higher velocities. But Bibler says the only real solution may be to compensate the neighbors. “They may just have to buy these people out, which is not what they want. They don’t want to move. They just want their lives back.”
It took eight years of town discussion before Falmouth’s first turbine went online last spring. The delay wasn’t because of heated opposition. Instead it took state and federal grants and incentive programs to make community wind economical.
Cities and towns across the state are now interested in turbines as a way to get stable energy prices with reduced environmental impacts. But on Cape Cod, what’s called the “Falmouth experience” has left a string of turbine proposals in limbo.
Part Five
Jess Bidgood/WGBH
Mark Cool and Annie Hart Cool stand on the deck in their backyard. Most of the time, they get pressure headaches when they’re out there, due to the rotation of Wind One’s blades.
FALMOUTH, Mass. — Since the turbine began spinning last April, Mark Cool can’t spend much time in his West Falmouth yard without getting headaches and feeling changes in pressure.
“Everybody’s flown,” he explained. “The sensation that best describes it is when you are about to reach pressure altitude on the climb out or descending, and your ears pop for relief. I’m walking around the yard with that sensation right before the pop.”
Cool says chewing gum helps with the pressure changes. The more immediate problem is that since the town installed the 400-foot turbine at the wastewater treatment plant last spring, Cool and his wife Annie have had trouble sleeping. So when the winds get gusty, Annie goes to the back bedroom where she has a noise machine, and Mark, an air traffic controller, heads to the basement couch.
Jess Bidgood/WGBH
Falmouth’s Wind One turbine has caused health problems for some of its neighbors. Many residents are worried about the ramifications of a second turbine, pictured here, which has not yet been turned on.
“That’s how we live around here,” he said. “We plan everything around, okay, do I want to sleep tonight, or should I risk possibly being awoken by the wind turbine?”
More than a dozen households near Falmouth’s Wind One turbine have similar problems, and it’s prompting neighbors to speak out.
Steven Clarke is the Patrick Administration’s top wind official. He says there are no clear answers as to why Falmouth’s turbine is generating so many complaints, and that neighbors, the town and the state’s Department of Environmental Protection are still trying to sort it out.
“There have been assumptions made that it’s either siting or mechanical issues or other issues that are behind the concerns, but I think it is too early to say,” he said.
Clarke says the Cape is a critical part of the state’s wind program. But all the discussion about Falmouth is hurting the effort.
“I think what’s happened is there has been a localized issue in Falmouth,” asserts Clarke, “and then that certain folks have made generalizations based on that, which I think are inaccurate. And that’s made it more difficult to get other projects built on the Cape.”
Wind industry folks say it’s too early to gauge whether Patrick will reach his goal of generating 2,000 megawatts of electricity from wind by the end of the decade because dozens of turbine proposals are still working their way through local boards. Still, 23 turbines have been installed in the state since Patrick took office in 2007, and to help the process along, the Administration is looking to create a state board to oversee the siting of turbines.
Liz Argo, a prominent wind consultant on Cape Cod, welcomes a state siting board for turbines, but says wind opponents are using the stories coming out of Falmouth to discourage wind projects, and those stories will likely spread off-Cape as well.
“So like any good campaign manager, they’re going to throw up the poster child. And the poster child is Falmouth,” Argo said. “So I would imagine that off-Cape the horror stories coming from Falmouth are going to be used to scare the population the same way they are being used down here.”
In Mark Cool’s view, he’s not telling horror stories; he’s just talking about his experience. Cool says he likes the idea of a turbine saving taxpayers money. And Gov. Patrick is right to promote wind, he says. The problem is, something’s gone wrong in Falmouth.
“Conceptually it’s a good product,” Cool said. “The Falmouth experience should represent to Deval Patrick, to the state, what didn’t work. So the investigation should be why didn’t it work. So whatever is taken from that analysis, apply it so it won’t happen again. You won’t have a Brewster experience or a Bourne experience.”
Complaints about large turbines near residents are not limited to Falmouth. Places such as New Zealand and Europe had a head start on their installation, and there are ongoing discussions there about health effects and the need for more regulation. Such claims are controversial. But what’s known for sure is that the Falmouth Experience has hurt the land-based turbine effort on the Cape. What’s yet to be seen is whether it will have the same affect state-wide.
Why not to dismiss health impacts of wind turbines
curb climate change while helping build the new green energy economy. But complaints about adverse health impacts – loss of sleep, headaches, depression – have surfaced in communities around the world where wind turbines are located in close proximity to homes, including here on Cape Cod. In their efforts to dismiss claims of adverse health impacts caused by nearby wind turbines, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) comes out looking more like big industry than grassroots environmentalist.
I was a toxicologist in a former career, and I see a lot parallels between this debate and debates about the toxicity – or not – of chemical pollutants. So, here are three reasons not to dismissarguments for and against dismissing complaints about wind turbines drawn from the environmental movement and the science of toxicology.
Argument: It’s all in their heads
An AWEA-commissioned review of the science surrounding wind turbines, sound, and health asserts that the main impact of wind turbine noise is to annoy people:
A feeling described as “annoyance” can be associated with acoustic factors such as wind turbine noise. … Annoyance is clearly a subjective effect that will vary among people and circumstances. … the main function of noise annoyance is as a warning that fitness may be affected but that it causes little or no physiological effect. Protracted annoyance, however, may undermine coping and progress to stress related effects. … The main health effect of noise stress is disturbed sleep, which may lead to other consequences.
And yet, they draw a line between “annoyance” and a health impact: (my emphasis)
There is no evidence that sound at the levels from wind turbines as heard in residences will cause direct physiological effects.
Rebuttal: Immune suppression
AWEA’s argument seems to hinge on dismissing annoyance as a subjective, emotional response and, thus, dismissing the secondary health effects of annoyance. But consider this: certain chemicals can alter the immune system, impairing its ability to fight off infections. This might not be a problem if we lived in germ-free bubbles (i.e. not a direct health problem). But in the real world, the increased risk of infection poses a serious health threat. Not satisfied? I won’t claim this is a perfect analogy, but my point is that it seems disingenuous to dismiss the end results of a chain reaction because the first step isn’t severe enough.
There are also deeper flaws in AWEA’s argument that there are no direct health impacts:
- As discussed earlier this week, the word “annoyance” as it is used by several researchers addressing the wind turbine issue has a technical definition that encompasses “a significant degradation of quality of life.” As such, some scientists and medical professionals consider annoyance to be an adverse health effect in itself.
- Sleep disturbance and deprivation need not be a secondary effect of stress; noise at levels typically produced by large turbines is capable of partially or fully waking a person some people. Prolonged sleep deprivation constitutes a medical issue in itself, and is also a trigger for other health problems.
- Some residents report physical sensations – like ear popping – not related to stress. There is little or no scientific data to address these claims … a point I’ll get to shortly.
Argument: It only affects a small number of people
Dr. Robert McCunney is an MIT researcher and a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He was a member of AWEA’s expert panel that reviewed the available science and determined that there is no evidence that wind turbines directly cause health effects. He has also provided expert testimony in court to that effect. He says it’s important to remember that most people aren’t negatively affected by wind turbines:
… at least in the studies that are available, the percentage of people who report annoyance in the proximity of wind turbines tends to be a relatively low… it’s not the predominant effect, and it’s not a majority of people who report these symptoms.
Furthermore, the AWEA report states that “a small number of sensitive people … may be stressed by the sound and suffer sleep disturbances,” citing above-average sound sensitivity, as well as personality traits and pre-existing negative attitudes toward wind turbines as factors predisposing persons to such impacts.
Rebuttal: Cancer clusters
To only consider impacts that affect the majority of people holds wind turbines to a standard that would be unthinkable for chemical pollutants.
Did drinking water contaminated with industrial chemicals give the majority of children in Woburn, Massachusetts leukemia? Or did chromium give the majority of people in Hinkley, California cancer? Absolutely not. If they had, documenting those cancer clusters would have been far more straightforward. But both were eventually validated and resulted in court settlements (check out A Civil Action and Erin Brokovich this weekend for the full stories, if you’re not familiar).
For that matter, is lead any less of a concern because it mostly impacts young children and unborn babies – a particularly sensitive portion of the population?
The standard is not a majority effect, but rather, a greater than expected occurrence of symptoms in any segment of the population, based on comparison with other turbine-free areas of similar geography, demographics, etc.
Argument: There’s not enough evidence
AWEA doesn’t deny that people living close to wind turbines around the world are reporting negative impacts. However, most of the surveys and case studies that currently exist are what scientists call anecdotal data – personal stories that have not been subjected to rigorous scientific investigation or the quality-control process of peer review. Thus, Dr. McCunney and the AWEA panel insist that there’s not enough scientific evidence to conclusively link wind turbine noise to health complaints.
Rebuttal: Precautionary principle
Here we can draw on an idea long embraced by the environmental movement and the scientific community (although less so industry or government) – that of the precautionary principle. The 1998 Wingspread Conference convened by the Science and Environmental Health Network crafted and adopted the following definition (my emphasis):
Where an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.
In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public bears the burden of proof.
The process of applying the Precautionary Principle must be open, informed and democratic, and must include potentially affected parties. It must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action.
In 2005, UNESCO released a report aimed at clarifying when and how the precautionary principle should be applied:
The [precautionary principle] applies when there exist considerable scientific uncertainties about causality, magnitude, probability, and nature of harm;
This would certainly seem to be the current situation with regard to claims of health impacts caused by wind turbines. We do not yet have controlled, peer-reviewed studies that nail down exactly how many people are affected, what their symptoms are, when they began, and at what distances and sound levels they occur. Establishing the who, what, when and where of a problem is an important first step before moving on to the more intricate questions of how and why. So there’s a long way to go before we reach a rigorous scientific understanding of the relationship between wind turbines and health. But the highly suggestive evidence at hand almost certainly meets the standards of the precautionary principle, and warrants further consideration by scientists and public policymakers.
EXTENDED INTERVIEWS
In Part One of his series, The Falmouth Experience: The Trouble With One Town’s Wind Turbine, WGBH radio reporter Sean Corcoran spoke to Neil Andersen, a Falmouth resident who says the nearby wind turbine has had catastrophic effects on his health. Here’s more of their conversation, plus a series of photos of the log Andersen and his wife keep of the noise and its effects on them.
Jess Bidgood/WGBH
Neil Andersen sits in his kitchen. Andersen says the noise from the wind turbine near his Falmouth home has caused emotional and physiological problems for he and his wife.
Neil Andersen: We knew there was a turbine going over there, we were not notified of any meetings or any type of concerns. In other words, there was no input from this residence.
I am an energy conservationist, I’ve had my own passive solar building company for 35 years. I was actually looking forward to that turbine being erected there. Although when it went up it was quite astounding the size of it.
I was proud looking at it from this viewpoint until it started turning. And it is dangerous, Sean. Headaches. Loss of sleep. And the ringing in my ears is constant. Never goes away. That started probably in May. It’s a constant reminder of that thing. I can look at it all day long, and it does not bother me. It’s quite majestic. But it’s way too close.
Sean Corcoran: How long after it started to spin did you start feeling some sort of symptoms?
Jess Bidgood/WGBH
The sign at the end of the Andersens’ driveway, which is just over 1,000 feet away from the turbine.
Myself, it took me about a month and a half, maybe two months, to manifest all the symptoms. First it was the pressure in the head. The ears popping for no reason at all. Trying to get the water out of your ears and there was no water there. My wife, the first day, she feels it and notices it, and she feels it and notices it every day.
People talk about the noise, it gets loud. It gets jet-engine loud from this point right here. But the noise is the minimum component of that turbine. There is a pressure involved that gets into your ear, like you’re climbing at altitude in an airplane and your ears pop.
And there is a low-frequency pulse that particularly drives me crazy and some of the neighbors around here. It is a once-per-second low-frequency pulse, and it messes up your vestibular organs in your inner ear. And gives you a sense of off-balance and vertigo.
We both have signs of these symptoms. Headaches. My wife gets headaches three or four times a week, she wakes up with a headaches. She’s actually sleeping in a back bedroom right now with earplugs and a white noise machine trying to mask the sound. But it is really not doing any good because the sound just comes right through the windows, right through the insulation, right through the earplugs. And the pulse is right there.
Can you hear it right now?
You don’t hear it. It’s inaudible. There’s testimony from all over the country of the same thing, people complaining about the turbines. Denmark, Australia, Canada, the United States. But there is really no peer-reviewed medical info, which I hear all the time. Prove it, they’re saying. Prove it. Come down here and hear it yourself if you want.
And do you take that as people calling you a liar or people calling you a fool?
I’m not sure. I think they just don’t want to believe it. It’s so ironic, here I have to try to get that thing knocked down. Basically it’s a good principle, anything that can wean us off the number-two fuel, heating oil, and that type of thing is good for us, but it has to be done correctly. In this case it certainly wasn’t.
They look at us as being the bad aspect of this. But the people in the wind industry, you cannot turn a blind eye to this. You know about it.
I’m sorry we don’t have doctors that have come to prove it. I welcome anybody to come down here with their testing equipment and test what this thing does, but I will tell you, it does hurt the wind industry. And I know there are properly-sited wind projects out there that are getting knocked down because of this. But that’s okay too.
I think everybody should just stop for awhile and figure this out. You can’t just be forcing these on people.*
“I’m Barry Funfar, We’re at my home, 27 Ridgeview Drive in Falmouth. We came to the Cape in 1979, we moved here on Labor Day, which was quite an experience with everyone else leaving. I thought it was like a nuclear evacuation or something and we were the only ones coming on. But we then proceeded to build this house, we had purchased a lot in 1978, we moved into this home in 1982.”
Courtesy Barry Funfar
Barry Funfar taped his own poster to the sign near the energy plant where Wind One stands.
On the arrival of Wind One:
“I was a little skeptical as far as the noise, which was my biggest concern. So I went to all the meetings the town energy committee hosted for that. And they hosted a bus tour up to Hull, Mass., to see the windmill facility up there. And I didn’t detect a single noise of that one, not a single sound, which put my fears to rest. Really. And after that I really had no qualms whatsoever about these being built.”
On the health effects of Wind One:
“We actually do not have a noise problem inside our home, unless we have a window open and are standing by that open window. For me it’s an outdoor problem. Wherefore, I have PTSD. And I have a disability from that, I’d been in Vietnam for 19 months. And then, since 2003, I’ve going twice a week to the VA for a counseling and various appointments to do with the PTSD. But I was doing extremely, extremely well. I had made so much progress that I really had a new life and was feeling very good about everything. And I have a couple of grand little grandkids and that can serve to make life very wonderful.
“But the sound so got to me that my doctor at the VA told me that I had to move. She said, ‘You cannot take that added stress and anxiety.’ Because it put me into depression. I had to leave my home for the month of August; I lived at my son’s place in Mashpee to come out of that depression.
“And I have a letter from another medical provider that what the windmill has done for me as far as the anxiety and depression, hoping the town would have some leniency on me, but that really hasn’t carry any weight with anything.
“But it has had, like, major effects on my health. Where I can say for my wife she hardly notices.”*
Is annoyance a health impact?
Jess Bidgood/WGBH
Neil and Elizabeth Andersen live near Falmouth’s first municipal wind turbine. They keep a record of noise levels and their reactions.
It’s the million-dollar (or five million, as the case may be) question in the debate about wind turbines:
What constitutes a health impact?
It is undeniable that some nearby neighbors of large wind turbines – be it in Falmouth or Maine, or Europe or New Zealand – report serious quality of life impacts that they attribute to wind turbine noise. At the heart of the debate about how to handle such complaints is the issue of whether those impacts constitute what medical professionals would define as adverse health effects or whether some people are “just annoyed” by the sound.
But in the comments on Sean’s second story, MJ points out that the word “annoyed” could be part of the problem:
The word annoyance is often misinterpreted by the general public, and apparently Ms. Goldstone, as a feeling brought about by the presence of a minor irritant. Ms. Goldstone seems unaware that in the medical usage it exists as a precise technical term and defines annoyance as a mental state capable of degrading health.
Suter (1991) presents a formal definition of annoyance:
“Annoyance has been the term used to describe the community’s collective feelings about noise ever since the early noise surveys in the 1950s and 1960s, although some have suggested that this term tends to minimize the impact. While “aversion” or “distress” might be more appropriate descriptors, their use would make comparisons to previous research difficult. It should be clear, however, that annoyance can connote more than a slight irritation; it can mean a significant degradation in the quality of life. This represents a degradation of health in accordance with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) definition of health, meaning total physical and mental well-being, as well as the absence of disease.”
This is a point that was also made to me by Dr. Michael Nissenbaum – a radiologist who has conducted a soon-to-be-published survey of residents living at varying distances from two wind energy installations in Maine (extended interview post in the works). The disparate uses of “annoyance” in common parlance and technical language is precisely why Sean and I chose to use the word “disturbing” rather than “annoying” when discussing wind turbine noise.
What I believe triggered MJ’s comment (correct me if I’m wrong) was my quote:
Many scientists and wind-energy advocates say that while people may become annoyed by turbine noise, annoyance is not considered a health impact from a clinical perspective. That said, chronic annoyance can build into stress, and stress could cause many of the symptoms people are complaining about.
This is essentially the stance of the American and Canadian Wind Energy Associations (AWEA and CanWEA), as articulated in a review of available science conducted by an expert panel they convened. While they lay out this chain connecting annoyance to stress, and stress to the symptoms being reported by nearby neighbors of turbines, they maintain that annoyance is not a health impact and, thus, “the body of accumulated knowledge provides no evidence that the audible or subaudible sounds emitted by wind turbines have any direct adverse physiological effects.” The word “direct” seems to be a key part of the argument.
I spoke with Dr. Robert McCunney – an MIT researcher and a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who was a member of AWEA’s review panel and has provided expert testimony in court to the effect that wind turbines do not directly cause health effects. He argues that another key issue is the difficulty of pinning down the source of annoyance.
… [annoyance] is a really nonspecific finding in that it can’t be specifically related to one or two causes. It has to be evaluated in its context in terms of the other potential causes of annoyance… Clearly there a lot of individual variations in how people respond to any particular stressor, whatever that may be, in terms of reporting annoyance and in terms of health effects.
Of course, to focus on annoyance (clinical or otherwise) ignores another commonly reported symptom – sleep disruption and deprivation – which is an adverse health impact in itself, as well as a trigger for other medical problems.
In either case, McCunney argues that, in order to establish a rigorous connection between wind turbines and health impacts, studies need to document sound levels, as well as health status, both before and after wind turbines are installed. And they should be published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. There are a growing number of case studies and surveys documenting self-reported symptoms after a wind turbine or wind farm has gone into operation, but studies that meet McCunney’s standards are currently lacking.*
Liz Argo: None of us want to throw Falmouth under the bus, but what can we learn from Falmouth?
As we go forward, there has to be a certain degree of conservatism that’s brought into doing a sound study. The parameters that guide what you are looking at — maybe those need to be adjusted.
Falmouth has proven that it comes right up against current the sound levels that are acceptable. We know why now: It’s an older turbine technology that is noisier and it’s a quieter environment. So 10 dB there over ambient (sound) — that’s probably little bit more than family should have to as we go forward. I think we’ll see as we go forward and that the sound level will be lowered. Instead of having 10 db over you might have 8 db over or less.
In Brewster, we’ve learned a lot form Falmouth, and it’s such a shame that it’s being characterized as another Falmouth, that it could be another unpleasant experience. We just know from the sound tests that its sound levels are so much lower than what they have in Falmouth. Different turbine technology and a louder ambient environment.
Sean Corcoran: So what happened in Falmouth has already infected the debate here on Cape Cod.
Liz Argo: What happened in Falmouth has very definitely made doing any well-sited wind project on Cape Cod nearly impossible right now.
Sean Corcoran/WGBH
Liz Argo takes video testimony of turbine neighbors in Hyannis Country Gardens.
You’re touching on the whole crux of the issue for getting a project to go forward, even a well-sited project. We have studies that are peer-reviewed journaled study. Let’s use real estate because that’s the topic it keeps coming back to, that and infrasound. We have the studies that say real-estate values will not be impacted. But we have too many people who are too panicked who are bringing forward less-than-peer-reviewed studies, but they’re throwing so much noise and study at it that even the peer-reviewed studies end up being questioned.
There’s a fellow from Illinois that has been asked to do a study, he’s an appraiser. His work has not been peer-reviewed. But it’s being bought as an equivalent to these peer-reviewed studies. And the planning board, unfortunately, they’re not able to distinguish between a study of one level and study another level, lesser level.
These planning boards and select boards and so on, they are not experts in wind, they have other jobs they are doing a great job, and without them we’d be lost. But to put these decisions in their hands is almost unfair to them. They’re expected to take in mountains of information and somehow digest it and sort through, saying, “Okay, this is legit, this is not legit.” It’s just asking too much of them.
The Wind Energy Siting Reform Act holds tremendous promise for wind development in Mass., particularly on Cape Cod. We need standards. If the standards can be brought forward with that kind of professional level of research and attention then we would have a terrific bar terrific guideline for correct wind citing.
We need a wind-energy siting-reform group they can come in and say those are hugely different projects, and help local planning boards understand it. And here’s why: Right now, (planning boards) are just being buffeted by the waters that are pushing them one way and then another way.
With a well-educated and formulated wind-energy siting-reform act coming out of Boston, we’d have some guidelines that would help everybody.*
(There’s also) so-called flicker, which is a very intense strobe-like fact which is almost intolerable. Its very, very disrupting, people can’t function normally. It’s as if someone’s turning the light switch on and off every second. People have a low tolerance for that.
The issues are complicated to begin with. The acoustics are complicated, the health issues are complicated. All over the world, there’s definitely a trend towards more caution and more conservatism and more outright acknowledgment potential problems and overcoming the denial that there is a problem.
Every individual board that faces this problem now has to get up at a fairly steep learning curve in an attempt to try to make a good decision for their town. I think on the Cape this is especially complicated by the fact that most of the projects have been municipal rather than private. So the towns are conflicted. Every town is facing budgetary problems, just trying to pay the bills for their schools and their police forces and so forth in an era and in an against the backdrop of declining tax revenues.
So they’re all struggling, and suddenly they have this project to consider that will create revenue for the town. And seems to solve a lot of their other problems. They’re faced with this very complex task of trying to determine what the impacts might be, but, at the same time this is temptation because it seems to be as a revenue generator. It seems to be that you could build one of these cash generating machines and solve a lot of problems.
We hear it all the time. People say I went to Falmouth and I stood at the foot of the wind turbine and I don’t think it’s in a big deal.
That’s really irrelevant. You know, if you don’t live there, and you don’t live there under varying conditions and particularly if you’re not sleep being there every night when the ambient noise may drop — and there may be high winds at the level of the wind turbine but not that much ambient noise at the level of your house — you really can’t judge.*
