In a recent expert testimony, Dr. Ursula Bellut-Staeck told the Alberta Utilities Commission that they were not taking into account the impacts of industrial wind turbines and their generation of infrasound. This is an inaudible pulsation that is generated as the blades pass by the base of the turbine. These pulsations can travel for tens of kilometres, passing through buildings — and the human body.
Rule 0012 [of Alberta’s regulations] does not deal with infrasound but “is only dealing with the audible part, therefore not dealing with the infrasound part, and the infrasound effects… What is not being considered is infrasound as a physical energy, and the scientific findings that relate to that, that should also be considered now.
Dr. Ursula Bellut-Staeck, AUC Hearing #29377 on Oyen wind project, YouTube at 52:21
The problem, writes Dr. Calvin Martin Luther, is that the wind industry is obscuring the impacts of “noise” by failing to even measure infrasound. While the following letter written to Wind Concerns is slightly technical, it provides the reader with a basic understanding of the problem, which is essentially a cover-up of the real impacts of industrial wind installations on human, animal, and marine health….
Dr. Calvin Martin Luther in Exclusive to Wind Concerns
Obscuring Reality
Your dBA measurement has tuned out any infrasound: and that’s the core problem. They should stop using an “A” filter and use a non-filtered measurement, say, a “C” filter (which, in fact, also tunes out some infrasound), then the infrasound would come to the fore.
It’s the infrasound — noise/sound pressure waves below 20 Hertz. A C-filter will pick up some, not all, of this. An A-filter won’t pick up any. The human vestibular system along with various regulatory mechanisms in blood vessels are extremely sensitive to anything below 20 Hz. (I repeat, an “X” dB measurement is in fact a “X” dBA measurement. i.e., useless.)
For example, a 60 dBA noise can be innocuous as hell! It can be a mom yelling at her kid, “Get your butt over here!” No infrasound in that 60 dBA yelling. True, you would not want to listen to that yelling all through the night; it would be, by definition, a “nuisance” [as Health Canada refers to wind turbine “noise.”] By the same token, you don’t want to listen to me playing Sixties rock music on my piano through the night. (I play above 60 dBA, I assure you.) But, if you had to endure such torment, rest assured it does NOT have anything 20 Hz or below included in this overall cacophony.
What’s happening is that people are listening to turbine noise through the night, or even daytime, which may be well below 60 dBA. It may be 45 dBA. But, I repeat, the A-filter is not picking up an additional component: the infrasonic part, which, we know, turbines that are generating power do indeed produce.
So, you can’t simply say, “Hey! Let’s keep the turbine noise within x dBA of rural ambient noise.” What you need to exclaim is, “Hey! Let’s keep the turbine INFRASOUND entirely out of the rural ambient noise environment.”
Misleading Terminology?
The problem is the wind industry refuses to acknowledge infrasound! They pretend to address it indirectly, obliquely, via dBA measurements.
Rick James, a professional acoustician, spent the last decade of his life trying desperately to fight this deliberately obfuscating and cruel “noise measurement” protocol. He went to his grave having failed in this attempt.
Rick’s signal contribution was that he figured out that calling this “infrasound” is misleading. After all, it’s not a “sound”! What’s really going on is a jackhammer-like air pressure fluctuation, with high peaks and low valleys, produced by turbines.
Realizing this, Rick switched to measuring these turbine-generated pulsations with micro-barometers! Not A or C or non-filtered noise meters: micro-barometers! And he was right in doing this. A genius! Because when you get into anything below 20 Hz, you have exited the realm of noise and sound; you’re now in the dangerous vestibular domain of AIR PRESSURE FLUCTUATIONS. Thus, 1 Hz = 1/second air pressure fluctuation, and your not going to pick this up with a sound meter! The amplitude of these air pressure fluctuations can be really high to really low — high peaks and low valleys — and extremely rapid — a wide range of such PRESSURE FLUCTUATIONS. (To try and figure out the average of these peaks and valleys in rapid-fire, staccato discharges and call this “average” okay is an abomination and has nothing to do with science. It has everything to do with frank madness and cruelty, whether its victims are humans or whales & dolphins.)
This is the problem: People need to stop talking about noise and decibels. Take into consideration the air pressure fluctuations generated by these turbines — and the only realistic and humane way of identifying those is by using micro-barometers.
By the way, this is what’s happening to Cetus [whales, dolphines, etc.] in the ocean: their highly sensitive vestibular (depth-perception) and hearing organs are being jack-hammered by intense pulsed air pressure fluctuations. The result is catastrophic. Ask any early morning beach-walker in New Jersey. (I refer to angels like Roni Dalesandro who walk the beach before dawn and find the washed-up dolphins and whales. Click here for my article on this.)
In a word, “wind turbine syndrome” = torture.
Wind Concerns is a collaboration of citizens of the Lakeland Alberta region against proposed wind turbine projects.