The Bent Mountain Wind Farm

A community thrives when it nourishes its assets, not wastes them.

All of the sudden, Bent Mountain is on the minds of the rest of Roanoke. In my home-owning experience, I have noticed that we are by and large ignored completely by the rest of the county. But here we are, making newspaper headlines (well front page anyway). Not to help us strengthen and enliven our neighborhood, but to take short-sighted measures to ensure it becomes a ghost town. I hope you can see by allowing an outside company to come in, clear cut our mountain top, and put enormous turbines in our backyards you are in effect, hurting the entire county. This is no boon for us or for the environment. And what for?

You’ve heard it before. The energy it may produce in this terrain has not been studied; with erratic mountain wind patterns and an ineffectual design and inefficient storage capacity, the benefits seem likely to fall short from outweighing the negative effect this will have on the environment. The destruction of the ecosystem; the natural water table, the streams, the Roanoke river; habitats for human, plant, and animal will be negatively impacted.

What about all of those nasty health effects from the turbines? Sleeplessness, vertigo, nervous disorders, depression, etc. etc. Again, never tested in mountainous terrain, it could be amplified a thousand fold. No one knows.

Even those who would rather ignore the interests, the health and the well-being of Bent Mountain and its residents should consider this:

Self-preservation. After this wind farm is cleared to be built, I will try to sell my home before it’s worth less than what I owe. I sank every penny I had to buy this house. I put my heart into maintaining its value and beauty. I feel that is being stolen from me, that my immense financial and emotional investment could amount to nothing, and I feel helpless to stop it. I don’t want to live shadowed by 500 ft high turbines making sporadic or constant noises, blocking out the stars, cutting into sunshine, and marring the mountain. But neither will anyone else.
No one will buy my home. It will sit until I can no longer afford to keep it and it will go into foreclosure. I will be left with nothing. Others feel the same way, many have already put their homes on the market; some have already been on sale for years. How do you think living in a county with a bunch of empty homes worth next to nothing and hideously tall and ugly turbines also worth next to nothing will affect YOUR property values? How much will those empty worthless homes cost the rest of the county’s residents?

And once they get the clearance and permits to build a few turbines, you can bet they'll build more. And it won't be limited to just one mountain either. Potential homebuyers will avoid Roanoke county even if the wind farm is across town; because where there is one there is the potential for many more. Why take the chance that your home will be directly impeded on by future industrialization when you can just go somewhere else instead? 

Invenergy has no desire to help the environment. They have a desire to help themselves to loads of federal money in “green energy credits”. They don’t care one bit about our community or our planet. I think they came here thinking we’re a bunch of bumpkins they could flash 800K at and plow down this neighborhood without a fight. When I first heard about a potential wind farm here, I was excited. Until I researched and spoke to neighbors and looked at the facts. I was unprepared and astonished at the amount of evidence that this will do more harm than good. I think a good many of us were.

The company thought they could come in here and pull one over on us, and I think, I hope, that they were dead wrong.

No long-term jobs will be created. If we’re lucky this Chicago-based company might hire some locals for the construction. Then again, maybe they won’t. After that, nothing more needs to be done. They collect their mountains of money in federal subsidies and we collect mountains of ugliness and foreclosed homes. A community destroyed by short-sightedness. The mountain will be ruined and the company will move on to their next small town, in other words, their next potential mountain of money. Maybe they’ll lease even more land and continue building these skyscraper-sized turbines until Bent Mountain is one huge range of 500 ft high metal monstrosities. How does this benefit the environment? Why didn’t they go to a less populated part of VA? Why not go to sparsely populated areas of the mid-west, where wind is strong and steady and build turbines to correctly and efficiently store the energy for use elsewhere? Why in this densely populated county with pristine mountains and higher property values than every neighboring county? Why has this discussion even been allowed to go this far?

What about the airport? I wonder how many air travel companies will pull contracts when they hear their planes can’t land in Roanoke during inclement weather because they can no longer clear Poor Mountain? The airport goes out of business, jobs will be lost, and other companies won’t want to move here. More potential jobs lost.

$800,000?? They offer less than a million dollars to sacrifice the residence of over 1,000 Roanoke taxpayers who love their homes and their land. A little perspective, the county is spending 20 million dollars alone to widen less than a mile of road and build some extra bridges for reasons unfathomable to me. And you are ready to accept a mere 800,000 to destroy a town? Let’s say the average Bent Mountain resident pays $2,500 a year in property taxes. 320 families is all it takes to generate $800,000 in revenue EACH YEAR. Not to mention the other benefits and revenue this community brings the county. It makes more sense to make an effort to encourage the community to grow, to entice more taxpaying homebuyers and businesses to move here. But after these turbines scar the mountain, endanger the wildlife, and ruin our views, who in the world will want to be here who doesn’t have to? You will lose all of your higher income/higher tax bracket residents and they will move somewhere else. No one new will ever move here, houses will stay empty.

There is nothing of lasting value for Roanoke County in this deal, absolutely nothing.

Roanoke’s greatest value is in its beauty, the mountains, the beautiful hawks and brown eagles, the awesome sunrises and blue-tinted vistas. This county’s value is the mountain, pure and simple. Why did I move here years ago over any number of areas on the eastern half of the US? The breathtaking beauty. Billions of stars in a clear, black sky. Why did my family and neighbors move here years ago? Panoramic views of the valley and mountain tops cascading from one end to the other. The mountain.

Destroy the mountains and you will destroy Roanoke. It will become nothing more than a flat metal-lined truck stop on the way out. You could be paving the way for the unending industrialization of this community, literally. And again I ask, what for?

Please don’t forsake this area’s greatest assets, its people and its beauty.