The following is by a resident of Stark, N.Y., dated June 19, 2006.
She started in on me about Tug Hill Plateau. "We went for a drive last night," she said. "We went to Herkimer for dinner and Jeremy wanted to go for a ride. We drove up to Barneveldt and stopped for ice cream. Then we went on to Booneville and Lowville."
That's where the 195-turbine wind factory is.
"You have to go there! It's awful! Just awful! We can't let this happen here. I've never seen anything so awful." ...
She went on and on. There was some wind, but not much, on June 17. The turbines were just hissing. They arrived there shortly before dusk, and stayed for the turnover to darkness, to see the lights on the turbine towers. They were there for not more than an hour, perhaps less.
"You absolutely cannot compare Fenner and Madison to this," she said. "These are much taller than Fenner and Madison. And there are more of them. This is more like what ours will be, 80 turbines in neighborhoods. There is no comparison. We have to get our Town Board members to go up there. You look at the horizon and you see tips spinning, and you know there are more, just over the next hill. It never ends. It's like having turbines from here to Herkimer."
After I drove her home, her husband insisted that I come inside and see the video on his cell phone. "I almost drove off the road," he said. "I kept wanting to turn left, because the whole world was turning left. I got dizzy, and I was dizzy for ten minutes after we left the area." ...
He began calculating the area of the rotor sweep. "They were spinning at 16 revolutions per minute," he said. "I counted the revolutions. There are three blades. That's 48 blade sweeps per minute." "That's how many times you're going to get strobe flicker if you're in the shadow of these things," he said. "And they give you window blinds to stop it? That won't work. And you sure can't sit outside in the yard with a strobe flicker like that." ...
Many times over the past six months, we had quarreled over these turbines. She didn't want to believe that neighbors planning to put turbines on their property would be doing any harm to us. When she heard Gordon Yancey [owner of the Flatrock Inn on the Tug Hill Plateau] on Thursday evening, they could barely hear at the back of the standing room only crowd. But they heard enough to convince them to go up to Lowville and see for themselves.
... She now knows these turbines could sicken animals and people. The motion. The low frequency sound. The stray voltage. ... She was not dizzy and didn't get motion sickness when they went to Lowville. But she saw what happened to her husband. The effects of motion and sound vary in the population. When she saw what happened to him, suddenly everything she heard and read came into focus. ...
"We have to get every lease holder to go up there to Lowville," she said. It's only 2 hours one way. We left at 6:00, and we were home by midnight. We stopped for dinner on the way. Everybody has to make it their personal mission to get one landowner to go up there and see this."
"I had nightmares about the turbines all night last night," her husband said this Sunday afternoon.
wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism, animal rights
