Complaints about Wind Turbine Noise

After making the last post, I got a response from atomcat who included a link to the following site and video:

Wind Turbine Noise Video – Suncor Wind Farm Ripley Ont.

I understand the point he’s trying to make … sort of. Maybe I didn’t have my sound turned up high enough, but … somehow … I wasn’t impressed.

Okay, I understand these people live in the country. I grew up in a small town. Now I live in a city of about 250,000. They don’t like the noise which could be constant if the wind is constant.

Okay, just to do a reality check, I went out into my backyard. It’s nearly 1 a.m. and I could barely hear an industrial type of hum above the constant din of crickets chirping. After thinking about it for a while, I finally realized the hum was the sound of several hundred air conditioning units running in my neighborhood .. both the crickets and a/c units something I normally wouldn’t notice if I weren’t particularly atuned to listening to them.

Fortunately, it’s after midnight and the six or so hours of daily rush hour traffic that is generated on the four lane highway several blocks from my house isn’t currently adding to the noise pollution. People are generally patient and polite both in the morning and evening so it’s not a lot of horns blowing like I used to remember from childhood visits to downtown Atlanta. But … the hum of several thousand engines patiently waiting for a light to change or accelerating when it does, not to mention the friction noise of those engines multiplied by four where the tires meet the pavement do provide a relatively constant although varying background noise.

Now, this doesn’t take into account the mariachi band that also cranks up on the weekends at a Mexican restaurant about five blocks from my home. Yep, I can hear it … or the cannons firings when a local military college makes a touchdown on Saturdays in the fall. It’s several miles from my house. Or the fireworks being lit during the Fourth of July celebration at a city park across a river from my home … again several miles away. I live about five miles from a municipal airport and can occasionally hear jets revving their engines to take off. At least it isn’t the end of the runway at Atlanta International.

And yes, I grew up in a small town, population 1200. My parents had a farm and I spent a lot of time there working, playing and have even carried my daughters camping there. Again, the tree frogs and crickets seemed to make a lot more noise than the wind turbines on the video. The last time I camped there, at the farm … above the noise of the crickets and frogs … at night, I could hear the constant drone of a generator running on an adjacent farm across the creek about a half mile away. It didn’t bother me. Occasionally, I could hear a car run up the highway about a quarter mile to the west. If the wind was right, I could hear the neighbors talking at their homes in the river bottom anywhere from a quarter to half mile away.

One of the most restful nights of sleep I ever spent was falling asleep listening to the roar of waves crashing onto a beach. I can guarantee you it was a lot louder than those wind turbines but hardly objectionable.

Don’t these people have children playing and yelling, dogs barking, cattle lowing, pigs squealing? One thing that impressed me about the noise of the video was that the turbine sound, if that’s what it was … was the only sound. Do any people actually live nearby?

Wind makes noise … rustling through the grass or in the trees … howling in a storm. Running water … can’t you hear it? I could sit for hours listening to the creek on the farm flow by.

If this noise is supposed to make people sick, then I should be dead. But, fortunately for me, I live in a living world that is full of noises made by men, man-made machines, animals, insects and Mother Nature herself. If people weren’t so anal compulsive, they would just get used to the noise and ignore it like any sane person with something to do other than complain.

I’m sorry. I could sympathize … but I don’t. The only sound I hear in the video of the wind turbines is the noise made by the turbines … supposedly. Frankly, if that’s all the noise that the people have there, they need it to keep the place from sounding … and being … dead.

And, as far as me being careful of what I wish for … it wouldn’t be the dead silence of that video without the turbines.