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Editor’s note:  The following is a letter Dr. Pierpont wrote to a group in Turkey that’s trying to keep wind turbines out of its community.  (Click here for a PDF.)  We are told the wind developer has been ordered by a court to stop building the turbines.  Being Turkey, the developer has brazenly ignored the court order — and is proceeding full steam ahead.  (So much for the “rule of law.”)

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To:  Ms. Kabadayi-Whiting, Cesme, Turkey

From:  Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD

Regarding:  The proper siting of wind turbines

Date:  June 30, 2014

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I write to you at the request of Madeleine Kura, who tells me the lovely, seaside town of Cesme is about to get half a dozen 3 MW industrial wind turbines built on the edge of town, a mere 500 m from people’s homes. (I’m told that at least one of the turbines will be 300 m from a school.)  Furthermore, all this construction will be in hilly terrain.

Let me explain, clinically, why this is a bad idea. In 2009 I published what was then the definitive study of health effects caused by wind turbine infrasound on people living within 2 km of industrial turbines. The book, “Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Report on a Natural Experiment” (K-Selected Books), included 60 pages of raw data in the form of case histories (using case cross-over studies), demonstrating that living in proximity to wind turbines dys-regulates the inner ear vestibular organs controlling balance, position, and spatial awareness. Effectively, sufferers experience symptoms of sea-sickness, along with several related pathologies.

It turns out all this has been well known since the 1980s, when the US Department of Energy commissioned a report on wind turbine health effects — the report subsequently published by physicist Dr. N D Kelley and his colleagues at the Solar Research Institute in Golden, Colorado, bearing the title, “A Methodology for Assessment of Wind Turbine Noise Generation,” Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, v. 104 (May 1982), pp. 112-120.

In this paper we have presented evidence to support the hypothesis that one of the major causal agents responsible for the annoyance of nearby residents by wind turbine noise is the excitation of highly resonant structural and air volume modes by the coherent, low-frequency sound radiated by large wind turbines.

Further, there is evidence that the strong resonances found in the acoustic pressure field within rooms [in people’s homes] . . . indicates a coupling of sub-audible energy [infrasound] to human body resonances at 5, 12, and 17-25 Hz, resulting in a sensation of whole-body vibration (p. 120).

I discovered the same thing in my research. What Kelly et al. refer to as a “sensation of whole-body vibration,” I refer to as Visceral Vibratory Vestibular Disturbance (VVVD): “The internal quivering, vibration, or pulsation and the associated complex of agitation, anxiety, alarm, irritability, tachycardia, nausea, and sleep disturbance together make up what I refer to as Visceral Vibratory Vestibular Disturbance (VVVD)” (Wind Turbine Syndrome, p. 59).

Five years later, Dr. Kelley gave a follow-up paper at the Windpower ’87 Conference & Exposition in San Francisco, titled “A Proposed Metric for Assessing the Potential of Community Annoyance from Wind Turbine Low-Frequency Noise Emissions.”  Just so you understand the terminology, “emissions” means “noise & vibration.”  And the term “low frequency” includes infrasound.  And the antiseptic phrase “community annoyance” is code for Wind Turbine Syndrome — except the name had not been coined in1987.  (I  created it decades later.)  Kelley’s research once again had been funded by the US Department of Energy, Contract No. DE-AC02-83CH10093.

We electronically simulated three interior environments resulting from low-frequency acoustical loads radiated from both individual turbines and groups of upwind and downwind turbines. . . .

Experience with wind turbines has shown that it is possible . . . for low-frequency acoustic noise radiated from the turbine rotor to interact with residential structures of nearby communities and annoy the occupants. . . .

The modern wind turbine radiates its peak sound power (energy) in the very low frequency range, typically between 1 and 10 Hz [i.e., infrasound]. . . .

Our experience with the low-frequency noise emissions from a single, 2 MW MOD-1 wind turbine demonstrated that . . . it was possible to cause annoyance within homes in the surrounding community with relatively low levels of LF-range [low frequency range] acoustic noise.  An extensive investigation of the MOD-1 situation revealed that this annoyance was the result of a coupling of the turbine’s impulsive low-frequency acoustic energy into the structures of some of the surrounding homes. This often created an annoyance environment that was frequently confined to within the home itself (p. 1, emphasis in original).

I am attaching a copy of Kelley’s 1987 paper.

Besides my research, which pretty much duplicates Kelley’s, there is the work of Dr. Alec Salt, Professor of Otolaryngology in the School of Medicine at Washington University (St. Louis, Missouri), where he is director of the Cochlear Fluids Research Laboratory. Professor Salt is a highly respected neuro-physiologist specializing in inner ear disorders and in particular the mysteries of the cochlea.

Prof. Salt’s research dovetails with mine and with Dr. Kelley’s. For many years, acousticians and noise engineers have vigorously maintained that “if you can’t hear it, it can’t hurt you.”  That is to say in the case of wind turbines, “If you can’t hear the low-frequency noise in the infrasound range, it can’t hurt you.” (lnfrasound, by definition, is noise below the hearing threshold, typically pegged at 20 Hz and lower. People feel infrasound in various parts of the body, though typically they cannot hear it.) In any case, Professor Salt and his colleagues have demonstrated conclusively, definitively, that infrasound does in fact disturb the very fine hair cells of the cochlea.

With this discovery, one of the main arguments advanced by the wind energy industry — namely, that wind turbine infrasound was too low to be harmful to people, since they could not hear it — was demolished. Prof. Salt has proven that, “If you can’t hear it, it can still harm you.”

This past winter, P