Noise makes Mount Pleasant a little less pleasant

“There’s a vibration, a humming, and at first it bothered me terribly. I couldn’t get to sleep at night. Then I bought a CD player and now I go to bed every night with music playing. The noise doesn’t bother Malcolm so much because of his deafness.”

The couple attended the wind roundtable May 24 to share their experience of living close to a wind turbine. “Maybe telling them about how it has been for us will be helpful,” says Muriel.

The Ritchies say they are fans of green energy. “Wind, solar, tidal—I think these are good things,” says Malcolm. “I even built a solar panel and we used it to heat water at the cottage. But it meant we had to take our showers every day at 5 p.m. and that didn’t sit too well with the kids.”

The Ritchies say they were excited when the Mount Pleasant turbine was being constructed. “We took pictures, we even talked about cutting some limbs off our trees so we’d have a better view of it.”

But once it became operational there was the noise. “And I thought I would go crazy,” says Muriel.

The Ritchies say both the volume and quality of the noise from the turbine, which is located 600 metres from their home, varies from day to day.

Some days there is nothing at all. Some days there is humming, and other days the Ritchies have heard a noise they describe as ‘banging’.

The past two summers the couple has also been bothered by noise from the rock quarry near the turbine. That operation is even closer to their home—less than 200 metres—and the sounds of rock being crushed and trucks being loaded makes living at Mount Pleasant decidedly less pleasant.

Malcolm says he is certain the combination of the two has negatively affected the value of the couple’s property. “We have a fish pond. There are butternut and walnut trees. I built the house 31 years ago and I always thought the property’s value would steadily increase. But I’m not so sure about this any more.”