Viewpoint / Injured by Viking’s subaudible noise pollution
Westside resident Sally Huband has been forced to sell her house in East Burrafirth to escape subaudible acoustic emissions from the Viking turbines. Here she details her – so far – unsuccessful attempts to get the industry to act on the issue.
In last week’s Shetland Times, David Thomson, the chief executive of Shetland Aerogenerators Ltd. and co-chairman of the Shetland Net Zero Energy Forum, asked us to inject some realism into our energy industry commentary.
This I will do but first I should mention that I emailed David Thomson in October last year. I asked him to contact SSE to request that they switch their turbines off in conditions when sound waves travel further, in temperature inversions for example, to prevent harm to human health. He did not reply.
I wrote to David Thomson because I have been injured by the subaudible acoustic emissions of the Viking wind farm’s turbines. Both tinnitus and hyperacusis with pain, a condition in which sound causes pain, are life changing. This barotrauma and accompanying vestibular system disruption (nausea and loss of balance) are bad enough but becoming sensitised to the acoustic pollution of turbines is torture. We were forced to sell our home.
The gaslighting of people harmed by the wind industry is well documented. In Shetland, for example, we have David Thomson’s (then of Viking Energy Shetland LLP) letter to Drew Ratter (then Chair of the Shetland Charitable Trust’s investment committee) dated 5 September 2013. It is worth seeking out. You can play wind industry gaslighting (windlighting?) bingo with it. All the phrases are there.
Evelyn Morrison campaigned against Viking from the outset on the grounds of harm to human health. She is now vindicated. In contrast, David Thomson is culpable. Are all of the councillors who voted for Viking culpable?
Last autumn, I also emailed Chris Bunyan, the chair of the Shetland Community Benefit Fund which disburses SSE and Shetland Aerogenerators Ltd money. I explained my injuries and the ongoing harm and asked him to write to SSE to request that they switch their turbines off during weather conditions in which sound waves travel further. I pointed out that SSE built a 4.3 MW turbine just 2.25 km from Aith Junior High School and its two hundred or so pupils. He refused.
He did however confirm that the SCBF cannot be accessed by those of us forced to sell our homes following acoustic injury and harm, or to access funds for respite accommodation should we be unable to sell our house, or for loss of income should we be made so ill that we are unable to work.
He clarified that accessing SCBF funds means agreeing to three separate rules which forbid any criticism of SSE and its turbines. The Shetland Community Benefit Fund is not a regulated charity. This is deliberate. It would have been stripped of its charitable status by now.
It’s not news to any of us here in Shetland that the likes of SSE and Shetland Aerogenerators use benefit funds to divide and disempower communities. But perhaps it is news to you that energy companies also use community benefit funds as a mechanism of silencing the people that they harm. This is cheaper, of course, than awarding compensation on the basis of legally binding non-disclosure agreements.
Yell Community Council, Tingwall, Whiteness and Weisdale Community Council and Scalloway Community Council are apparently considering investing in Statkraft’s three consented but yet to be built wind farms in Shetland. Last October, I also wrote to Statkraft with two questions. I asked, in just one sentence, how Statkraft will compensate people who experience direct harm to their health from subaudible turbine emissions. Seumas Skinner, their Community Liaison Manager, offered a lengthy reply, the usual standard wind industry gaslighting.
I then asked if Statkraft would guarantee that people will not experience direct adverse health impacts from the subaudible emissions of their turbines. Seumas Skinner’s brief response to this question is interesting. Though Statkraft will not offer compensation or guarantee that people will be safe next to their wind farms, ‘if a need is identified’ they might consider tweaking the operation of their turbines.
So, has Seumas Skinner set a wind industry precedent in his acknowledgment that a need might be identified, that subaudible turbine emissions do harm people? Or is he making a false promise to lure me into a false sense of security? The answer is both. Statkraft and I both know that the only way to stop turbine harm is to switch turbines off. Or better still, don’t build them next to homes in the first place. And as SSE have demonstrated so well, energy companies only switch turbines off in order to harvest constraints payments.
Last week, we had the publication of a shiny new Shetland Islands Council commissioned report. The SIC is advised to consider a ban on more large onshore wind farms unless a significant level of community ownership can be achieved. This week, councillors approved the financial principles for negotiating community buy-in.
Councillors approve principles for community benefit negotiations
Community buy-ins to wind farms operated by companies like Statkraft are little more than community benefit funds on steroids, silencing mechanisms for their toxic acoustic pollution. The community is complicit in their own harm and the parasitical power company and their profits are protected by this community buy-in shield. It’s a next level honey trap in financial form. But now, with the SIC signalling the okay for community buy-ins, community council members in Yell and the Mainland may edge even closer to a sticky Statkraft trap.
For community buy-ins to work, power companies will need to rely on either a lack of due diligence in local decision making and/or local decision makers so hell bent on grabbing corporate money that they will intentionally sacrifice the health and wellbeing of the communities that they represent.
The SIC’s councillors may be somewhat clueless on the subject of turbines and their pollution, but SSE, Statkraft too, know very well what turbines can do to a human body and mind.
Years before Viking was constructed, SSE would phone residents in Fairlie, Ayrshire, to warn them that their Hunterston offshore testing facility turbines were due to be switched on. Residents could then travel a safe distance away from their homes for the duration. The SSE report to the Scottish Government regarding Hunterston is conveniently incomplete. I did not mention Hunterston to Seumas Skinner at Statkraft but, interestingly, he mentioned Hunterston to me, the SSE version.
Like the folk in Fairlie and Cumbrae, I entered into a complaints process with SSE in good faith. The first time that I met the SSE acoustician, he seemed overly anxious. I subsequently found out that he worked on the Hunterston case. I gave him the option of whistleblowing. He chose to decline.
‘The community is complicit in their own harm and the parasitical power company and their profits are protected by this community buy-in shield. It’s a next level honey trap in financial form’
The SSE complaints process is designed to protect their profits and not our health. There is no transparency and no end point. SSE cannot, of course, admit that their machines are toxic because they built so many of them so very close to our homes and to one school. Do not engage with SSE. They will witness your harm, make you document it, and will still refuse to switch their turbines off at the times when they are most dangerous.
If you have been injured or your wellbeing has been harmed by Viking, speak to the SIC Environmental Health Officers, they work from a basis of ethics and will treat you with care.
SSE also have the full protection of the Scottish Government in the form of its spurious turbine noise regulation (ETSU-R-97) which has been designed by wind industry acousticians to omit the particularly toxic subaudible acoustic pollution. The Scottish Government clings on to ETSU despite their devolved competency in planning policy, health, wellbeing and noise and meanwhile, from the south west of Scotland to Shetland, lives are destroyed by turbine injury and harm.
In all my correspondence with the Scottish Government to date, not once do they deny that turbines harm people. The Scottish Government is prevaricating in an attempt to consent as many corporate turbines as possible before safe setback distances are established much to the great inconvenience of companies like SSE and their shareholders. Though admittedly, these days it’s hard to know where the Scottish Government ends and SSE begins.
Meanwhile, here in Shetland, the cycle of corporate harm and local governance failure that David Thomson and Drew Ratter set in motion, continues on with councillors this week once again risking our health, wellbeing and livelihoods for more toxic corporate cash.
Councillors can still refuse any further hypothetical Vikings. Community council members can still choose not to invest in Statkraft’s three consented wind farms. A class action is inevitable, better to leave the Scottish Government, SSE, Statkraft and Shetland Aerogenerators liable, wouldn’t you agree?
Dr Sally Huband is trained in environmental, ecological and social science and specialised in community participation in environmental decision making for her master’s degree. Her first book Sea Bean won the Highland Book Prize. She is a member of the Scottish Green Party and has lived in Shetland for 14 years.
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