Giant turbines will make area less attractive for residents

Editor:

It defies common sense. There is no study that can convince me that any normal human being would actually gravitate to a community where homes are dwarfed by giant 591-foot industrial wind turbines.

Nobody drives through a gauntlet of these gigantic spinning towers and starts looking for homes with “For Sale” signs, although my gut also tells me there would be quite a few of those. Find a cozy home and settle under the turbines? In all honesty, I cannot imagine a thinking person would be drawn to these as he or she would be to beautiful hills, a body of water, or some other natural landscape feature.

Yet, the insistence of this unnatural attraction leads me to recall an old fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. Essentially, the emperor in the story was swindled by two tailors who said they would weave him clothing out of the finest gold threads. The catch was that these clothes would be invisible to all but those who were worthy of their office.

In short, no one in the kingdom wanted to admit that he could not see these clothes either, for fear of admitting he, too, was unfit. All who viewed the emperor in his procession pretended to admire the beauty of his finery, until a child exclaimed that the emperor was unclothed.

Those people who exclaim the “wonder” of industrial wind turbines remind me of those in the emperor’s kingdom who, too, wouldn’t admit their leader was naked. They denied their own common sense and their own eyesight in favor of what they thought they “should” say.

Surely these people have common sense and decent eyesight to see, like I do, that these nearly 600-foot abominations do not attract people to live under them, or near them, or even to be in sight of them. I haven’t seen one ad or promotional piece for any land for sale, or home on the market that includes the proximity of IWTs. Not in photos, not in any descriptions. If anything, it would be handled as more of an undesirable disclosure to the prospective buyer. In the case of Lighthouse Wind, how about something/s 30x higher than your home? Who needs a real estate study?

All health and environmental reasons aside, the naked truth is that “Emperor” Apex is an embarrassment. Those who see clearly what is unfolding here are being true to their five senses and to their own common sense. The only ones eager to deny reality are those who are also mesmerized by Apex tailors. They are the same ones who stand to benefit from Apex cash—the gold threads the rest of us taxpayers made possible.

Christine Bronson

Somerset

(Bronson is a member of the Somerset Town Board)