Wind turbine illness is a myth

It would be hard to find anyone who sleeps closer to wind turbines than farm manager Megan Mitchell who lives on the Capital Wind Farm near Bungendore.

“I love living on a wind farm, waking up to the beautiful rural landscape where my husband Andrew and I have been renting a cottage since September 2010.”

“We are surrounded by 30 turbines with the closest being less than a kilometre away. We can’t hear the turbines from inside our cottage at all. Outside of the cottage we can hear them in the distance but mostly we hear the noise of the wind in the trees and the cars on the road.”

“Andrew and I enjoy excellent health, exactly as we did before we moved to the wind farm. We sleep very well and haven’t suffered any health problems since arriving here.”

“Wind’s a renewable, sustainable and free source of energy and I think we are lucky to be able to utilise this.”

“Living on a wind farm has made us more aware of the way we were living and to be conscious of our environmental impact.”

“I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else,” said Ms Mitchell.

Ms Mitchell’s experience reflects the information contained in a new set of documents entitled ‘Wind farms, sound and health’, released last week by the Victorian Department of Health. The documents confirm that there is no evidence that sound you can’t hear can affect you. The documents are available athttp://www.health.vic.gov.au/environment/windfarms.htm.

Their contents are consistent with the NSW Department of Health findings in 2012 that there is “no evidence for wind turbine syndrome” and the South Australian Environment Protection Authority report in March 2013 ‘Infrasound levels near wind farms and in other environments’ which confirmed that the most significant contributors to household infrasound are airconditioners and traffic.