I can relate a funny anecdote about wolf kills: when timber wolves were first introduced to Yellowstone, accidental or incidental calf deaths in the ranches in the surrounding counties shrank tremendously. The reason? It's not because wolves are good for calves, it's because if a calf died, it must have been wolves that did it. The park service is obliged to pay for wolf kills, but if a cow just dies on its own the rancher eats that cost. Whenever one of these "wolf kills" is reported, the park service sends out their inspector to look for characteristic bite marks. More often than not he doesn't find any, so the park service doesn't reimburse the rancher, but that doesn't seem to stop the rancher from claiming the wolves did it. Total calf deaths are the same, but now instead of accidental deaths, it's always reported as wolves.

I suspect these people just had a mild case of the flu or a cold. More urban myths that can't be proved, like cell phones causing cancer.

It is true that in California near wind farms the land prices go down because of the noise -- but these are the old style props that spin much faster and are noisier.

For some reason I just don't like the looks of them when I'm within 500 metres. I find the plodding powerful rotation of the huge blades kind of frightening and unnatural. Maybe I played a video game as a child that where one had to navigate through huge propellers.

Leanan -

A good deal of work has already been done on analyzing the sound and low-frequency vibrations produced by large wind turbines. However, much less is known about the long-term physiological effects of such, largely because there isn't a great deal of historical data to go by (offshore turbines, obviously, don't count).

As I understand it, each time a turbine blade passes in front of the support tower there is a slight decrease in wind pressure due to the 'shadow effect', and that in turn causes both a change in localized air movement plus a flexing of the blade. Then, of course there are the vibrations caused by vortex formation as the blade tip cuts through the air.

It is well known that low-frequency vibrations at a certain frequency and amplitude can cause all sort of physiological problems, both subtle and obvious, including nausea, vertigo, and general malaise. The US military has done research using low-frequency sound as a non-lethal weapon for crowd control. I recall the idea is to induce almost instantaneous nausea and loose bowels (or maybe worse if you turn up the volume).

So, there may or may not be a legitimate physical basis for some of the specific complaints by people living near wind turbines. I think this problem underscores the importance of proper site selection for onshore wind turbines. We will probably learn soon enough (and via the hard way) what is a safe distance to live from a large wind turbine.

A long time ago an operating engineer showed me that he could kill insects within a 100 foot radius of a turbine (commonly used to for large scale air-flow) just through rpm adjustment.

He said nobody at his workplace ever took him seriously when he told people.

I remember having a terrible sinus headache for hours afterward.