Seaside Residents Shocked as Houses Shake, Misled by Wind Turbine Appearance

A wind turbine project off the coast of Virginia Beach, Virginia, is whipping up some trouble for local homeowners.

Dominion Energy is in the process of developing a 176-turbine project off the coast of the vacation community.

But residents say the project is not making life any better.

“It’s interfering with our lives every day—2 a.m. the other morning, I was awoken by the room shaking,” Julie Brown of Virginia Beach said, according to WTKR-TV.

“It wasn’t the noise, it was the shaking,” Brown added. “You think is there an earthquake. I go over and look out the window and can see the lights and they’re working on it.”

Dominion Energy officials have said they will try to keep the noise down as the $9 billion project moves forward, telling residents in a recent town hall they were working on ways to blanker of buffer the noise.

Brown says it’s not working.

“The wind blanket right now is a joke,” Brown said. “There’s a wind blanket. It’s literally like a piece of paper hanging.”

Homeowner John Knight said he has installed soundproofing on his bedroom window, and has to deal with a crack in a wall he blames on the project, according to WTKR-TV.

“We’ve been having a lot of problems in the neighborhood with houses shaking, walls cracking, tiles cracking,” Knight said.

He said the project is nothing but “24-hour-a-day work that’s waking us up at night. We’re really worried about the long-term damage to our home.”

“Dominion is trying to mitigate this disruption,” Virginia Beach Vice Mayor Rosemary Wilson said. “I called Dominion and said, ’24/7, are you kidding? That’s too much for anybody to take.’”

But the noise is not all. The new turbines will be visible from the shore, which residents have said was not in the cards when the project was sold as a great idea, according to WAVY-TV.

“[Citizens] feel misled,” Wilson said. “They didn’t know you’d be able to see the turbines.”

“The citizens and us as leaders felt misled by Dominion … about the appearance of the wind turbines,” Councilman Worth Remick said.

Although Dominion has had turbines in the region for years as a pilot project, the new ones are 200 feet taller, a detail that WAVY reported was not fully spelled out to the community.

It noted that a 2018 comment from Dominion Energy said the turbines “will not be visible from the Virginia Beach shoreline.”

Project representative Jeremy Slayton said residents were told the pilot turbines were shorter than the ones for the full project, but when WAVY noted that the visibility issue was not linked to the height issue, “Slayton did not point to any specific presentation where visibility was addressed outside the pilot turbines.”