Dutch bus driver Claus aan de Wiel used to look toward five wind turbines, two hundred meters high, ten kilometers away, when he left his home for work. What will it be like when I get home? "Will it be another evening where the turbine noise rumbles like a rolling, roaring surf above the TV? I never slept a wink. Sometimes I got back on the bus after only three and a half hours of sleep. ”
The bus driver and his partner, Ine van den Dool, suffered after the Spui wind farm was built five hundred meters from their house. “ ... we were shocked. The noise was unbearable. The house was built by my parents, I grew up there and thought I would only leave between six planks, but we could not stand it ”, says Aan de Wiel. "Sound waves banged on the facades from three sides".
And so the couple left, as climate refugees in their own country. Ine van den Dool had physical problems from the noise when the wind turbines were running. She looked up “wind turbine syndrome”, a term from American doctor Nina Pierpont. Pierpont had documented a list of identical complaints for several people who lived near wind turbines: sleep disturbance, headache, tinnitus, dizziness, nausea, irritation and cardiac arrhythmias. van den Dool said: “Very recognizable. Falling asleep and staying asleep was no longer possible. I fled the house as often as I could.”
The two climate refugees from Piershil moved to a quieter place on Goeree-Overflakkee. They are the sixth family within two years to move from Oudendijk to get away from the wind turbine noise. Aan de Wiel now says he feels a lot calmer:
“I now understand the gigantic stress situation we were living in. It was as if I was there waiting for my death; once at home I didn’t feel like doing anything anymore. But if they tear down those turbines tomorrow, I’d love to return. I miss the place I used to be. It was a heavenly, healing place. Where we sat in the garden with friends until late. The wind farm has destroyed that. It was as if a jet plane kept circling overhead. I developed severe asthma and could not stop coughing at night. As if my body was screaming: this is not safe, you have to get out of here. ”
“We are no longer ‘bunker citizens’, agrees his partner. “We couldn’t sleep there with the window open, nor sit in the garden. Here we live outside again. And we sleep like marmots, as if we need to sleep in for a century.” Within two weeks after the move, Van den Dool was off the drug Ventolin, because her asthma complaints had disappeared. Is that a coincidence? "No, it proves to me what an abnormal life we had to live under the violence of those rotten turbines. ”
Dutch doctors, such as Sylvia van Manen, writing in the magazine Medisch Contact, warn against the effects of low-frequency noise, shadow cast and flashing red lights at night. The Leiden University Medical Center recently recognized a worsening of heart disease due to low-frequency sound. “If there are so many indications that it is wrong, then we should investigate further, right?”, says Fred Jansen of the Critical Platform Wind Energy. “Or at least follow the WHO advice. But yes, that would mean that fewer windmills would fit in the Netherlands".
Sound expert Marcel Blankvoort says the Dutch work with sound pressure averages, while other Western European countries, apart from Norway, allow a maximum peak sound pressure (aka volume) “And we don’t include background noise. Elsewhere, a turbine in an industrial estate is allowed to make more noise than in the countryside, because there is more noise there anyway. Here, the same standard applies everywhere. That is why wind turbines in a previously quiet polder are more likely to be perceived as a deterioration in the living environment.”
Dutch residents living close to biomass power stations complain about polluted air. Burning of woody biomass (aka wood) is another "climate changer". Billions of euros in subsidies have been promised for hundreds of biomass plants.
“Recently our bedroom was full of smoke again,” says Rini Ruitenschild from Ede. He lives one hundred and eighty meters from one of the local biomass plants, which burns wood. “It is not the first time. My wife has a lung problem. If your whole house is full of dirty air again, then you will become unruly. ”
Up on the 11th floor of a Zaandam senior apartment buikding, Jeanne Meester sees smoke drifting up from the biomass power plant about two hundred meters away. “The stench is unbearable. How do you get it into your head to place such a thing in the middle of a residential area, right next to a school and close to a hospital?”, says Meester. “We are concerned about the effect on our health and that of my flatmates.”
Wood combustion causes air pollution. There are no standards for ultra-fine particles entering our lungs. The Dutch Lung Foundation receives complaints about biomass burners. Last summer, the “phasing out of the use of woody biomass” was recommended by the Social Economic Council, an important advisory board to the Dutch government.
But Fenna Swart, of the Clean Air Committee, says: “ ... we don’t see anything of that phase-out yet. Because Minister Eric Wiebes fails to make it concrete with an end date and buy-out schemes. The House of Representatives stands by. Industry and politics are holding on to each other and our health is in check.”