By Robert Bradley Jr. – January 20, 2022
“It seems that, along with the tobacco industry, the wind industry has become well aware that their products are important to health. The introduction of larger turbines is also an issue because the larger the turbines, the more noise they generate.” (- Alun Evans, Center for Public Health, Queen’s College Belfast, below)
Of yesterday post presented a peer-reviewed paper that concluded that industrial wind turbines produce negative health effects on nearby residents: “Wind turbines and adverse health effects: Applying Bradford Hill’s criteria for cause (by Anne Dumbrille, Robert McMurtry and Carmen Krogh).
That article inspired an editorial in the same journal by Alun Evans’s Center for Public Health, Queen’s University of BelfastInstitute of Clinical Sciences B, Belfast, UK.
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Evans’ editorial, ‘ Loud Noise: Cigarettes and Wind’ [Environmental Disease (2021) 6: pp. 109-10)]republished below (notes omitted).
In the absence of a direct means of empirically assessing causality, Dumbrille, McMurtry and Krogh used nine criteria devised by the British statistician, Austin Bradford Hill, to determine causality. fruit. They applied them to address the adverse health effects associated with wind farm noise and found all nine were sustained.
Bradford Hill’s outstanding contribution to Public Health, together with Richard Doll, assembled a team of 40,000 British doctors to study the lung cancer epidemic that emerged during the first half of the 20sorder century. They showed a strong link between the amount of cigarettes smoked and the development of lung cancer and other diseases.
These associations are famous for the Tobacco Industry, which has suppressed scientific evidence for years, but in the end, the companies had to apologize to the public. How long have the adverse health effects of wind turbine noise been known?
In 1967, a UNESCO publication discussed, “… the danger of sounds we cannot hear”, defining Ultrasound as <30 Hz. By 1973, the Russians had determined safe upper limits for Ultrasonic Waves (<20 Hz) in different environments. In the 1980s, Kelley et al. investigated a single turbine in the US, where about 12% of homes within 3 km were affected by noise emissions.
The passage of the blades through the turbine racks caused low-frequency pressure pulses directed at the complainants’ homes. The situation is aggravated by a complex sound propagation process driven by topographic and atmospheric concentration. The impulsiveness of emitted low-frequency acoustic radiation has been identified as a major problem. Various recommendations have been made regarding noise reduction and how low frequency noise should be measured.
In the UK in 1990, the Batho (Noise Assessment Working Group) Report devoted a single, important page to Low Frequency Noise, commenting that it could have a serious effect on life. the lives of people affected by it: “Noise can be inaudible to Environmental Health Workers (EHOs), and measuring it often requires complex monitoring techniques. It has been stated that the conventional A-weighted scale is not suitable for its measurement, and the problem is real, cautions in bold: “…should fully support the current research agenda.”
In the United Kingdom in 2001, the Stanger Low Frequency Noise Report was prepared for the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It is based on the Batho Report but goes much further. Two years later, when the British Prime Minister launched his country’s “Our Energy Future”, based largely on wind power, there was no mention of low-frequency noise.
What happened? Although all potential renewable energy sources were considered in the early 1980s, by the mid-1990s wind power was considered paramount by the UK Government. In 1996, the Ministry of Trade and Industry, whose mission is to create the optimal environment for business success, without a profile on environmental protection, established the Working Group (WG) on Noise from Wind Turbines.
The WG’s summary is to identify noise levels that are expected to provide a reasonable level of protection, without unreasonably restricting growth. Of its 14 members, six direct and two indirect, with ties to the wind industry, three as civil servants and three EHOs, do not have any medical or planning input.
The impact of Low Frequency Noise has been reduced, so A-weighted noise measurements are recommended and only turbines with a center height of 32 m are considered. The WG’s primary concern is promoting wind energy, regardless of its impact on rural communities. This results in the highest allowable nighttime noise limit anywhere. A proposed review 2 years after 1996 never took place.
In 2011, a letter written by the CEO of the Danish wind turbine manufacturer, Vestas, to the Danish Minister of the Environment, was leaked and translated, asking why:
… That Vestas didn’t just change the wind turbines to make them less noisy? The simple answer is that it’s not possible right now and it takes time and resources as we are currently at the forefront of what is technically possible for our large wind turbines and they are efficient. most fruitful.
It seems that, in common with the tobacco industry, the wind industry is well aware that their products are extremely important to health. The introduction of larger turbines is also a problem because the larger the turbine, the more noise it produces.
More than half a century ago, Hill wrote that Public Health should “… always strive to improve environmental quality with a reduction in associated morbidity and mortality.” We still have a long way to go to protect public health from the effects of wind farm noise, as the authors’ findings demonstrate.
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