PUTTING INTO PERSPECTIVE THE RISKS TO PUBLIC HEALTH AND SAFETY POSED BY WIND TURBINE INSTALLATIONS
William K.G. Palmer
Abstract: This paper evaluates the risks to public health and safety posed by wind turbine installations, grounded in the special professional obligation of engineers to safeguard public welfare. The assessment also addresses specific concerns raised by residents living near such facilities. Risk is defined, following established methodology, as the combined answer to three questions: what can go wrong, what is the likelihood of it occurring, and what are the consequences. Potential failure scenarios were identified through two complementary approaches. The first examined 13 acute incidents (blade failures, fires, tower collapses and hub failures) that occurred among 2712 wind turbines operating in Ontario, Canada. The second investigated chronic noise conditions characterised by tonal-like features and cyclical amplitude variation that residents associate with annoyance and sleep disturbance. The calculated frequency of acute events is approximately 0.5 × 10⁻³ failures per turbine-year. Monitoring campaigns confirmed that special noise characteristics meeting psychoacoustic criteria for tonality and saliency occur chronically and correlate with resident complaints. Existing regulatory setbacks and warning measures were shown to be inadequate as protective barriers, allowing the possibility of fatal or serious injury outside the designated exclusion zones, as well as persistent noise-related impacts on health and well-being. The conclusions propose more robust deterministic setbacks based on observed impact distances, the inclusion of fire-suppression systems, and the adoption of improved acoustic criteria that capture tonal-like and cyclical noise features. Implementation of these measures would strengthen public safety protection and reduce noise-induced annoyance that affects health.
Keywords: Wind turbine, Public safety, Risk, Tonality, Cyclical noise, Annoyance
DOI: 10.24874/PES08.03A.008
Recieved: 11.02.2026 Revised: 20.05.2026 Accepted: 15.06.2026
UDC:
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