They moved their bedroom into the basement to hide from the effects, but they still couldn’t escape.
They took sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication. Cary, an engineer, started losing concentration during the day he was demoted at his job. Karen, a middle-school science teacher started grinding her teeth at night she had to wear bite splints. “The turbine #20 was so loud and the thumping was unbelievable. “This morning was horrible,” Karen wrote on April 4, 2013. These are the same symptoms that Shineldecker and his wife, Karen, recorded in a daily diary detailing problems they said didn’t exist before the Lake Winds Energy Park. It said that annoyance is “statistically related” to reports of migraines, tinnitus, dizziness and high blood pressure. In interviews with GateHouse Media, wind company officials and representatives of American Wind Energy Association cited numerous studies supporting that stance – most recently a 2014 Health Canada study that found no direct link between turbine noise and reported illnesses.īut the same study also found wind turbines “highly annoy” about one in 10 people, especially those living closest to the structures and those exposed to turbine noises exceeding 35 decibels. The wind industry denies turbines cause health problems. It’s the invisible intruder he felt was lurking in his home.Īnd like hundreds of other people living near wind turbines, he blamed these pulsations for not only his sleep disturbances but a cascade of other health problems also. It’s this eerie sensation that Shineldecker said stirred him from his slumber night after night.
The towering structures generate low-frequency pulsations that people have described as a “feeling or presence,” something that is “felt rather than heard.” The closest loomed less than 1,200 feet from their door. This had become an almost nightly ritual since Thanksgiving 2012, when 56 industrial turbines in the Lake Winds Energy Park started spinning outside Shineldecker’s home in rural Mason County, Michigan. He finished checking his house and yard anyway, then returned to bed where he lay awake for hours, angry. The middle-aged father of two knew his fear was irrational, but it hijacked every sense in his body. His heart pounded as he raced through his house, flipping on light after light, in search of the intruder he would never find. In the Shadow of Wind Farms – GateHouse Media Michigan Wind Farm Cost a Family its Health, Home Michigan farmers, Cary and Karen Shineldecker have suffered more than their fair share of abuse from the wind industry, as detailed in this post from GateHouse Media (the site is well worth visiting, not least for the snazzy graphics and slick presentation).
And even more so because wind power is utterly meaningless: it can never be delivered as and when power consumers need it, meaning that it has absolutely no commercial value, apart from renewable energy certificates, production tax credits, guaranteed feed in tariffs and all other manner of mandates and subsidies that are costing taxpayers and power consumers hundreds of $billions across the globe. Turning peaceful and idyllic rural communities into industrial wastelands sticks in the craw of even life’s most grizzled characters in those communities. No manner of cynical finessing can excuse what’s done by this subsidy-soaked so-called ‘industry’.
Wherever the wind industry expands, so too a visceral hatred among those forced to suffer incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infra-sound. Right: 476-foot-tall turbines a quarter mile from their former home in Mason County, Michigan. Left: Cary and Karen Shineldecker at their new home.