CAWTILE continues fight against wind turbines in Great Lakes with public event

Irving, N.Y. (WBEN) - Are wind turbines in Lake Erie an environmental disaster waiting to happen? More people in Erie and Chautauqua counties are beginning to ask this question after a wind turbine failure in Nantucket littered surrounding beaches with debris.

Vice President of Citizens Against Wind Turbines in Lake Eries (CAWTILE), David Adrian, said Wednesday at a rally hosted by the organization that lake Erie's situation is unique, because zebra mussels, an invasive species, have essentially been acting as water filters, forcing a lot of heavy metals and other toxins that are suspended in the water to settle at the bottom.

If construction begins, all of the toxins will be reintroduced at highly concentrated levels.

"Our biggest concern when confronted with the proposal of putting wind turbines in Lake Erie was the environmental impact. 11 million people get their drinking water from Lake Erie, so water quality has been a really important thing to Western New Yorkers, and also the state and federal agencies that control Lake Erie's water quality," said Adrian. "With the impact of a number of wind turbines in Lake Erie, the biggest problem, as we see it, is the water quality would be affected through a problem with concentration of heavy metals, PCBs and dioxins in the bottom of Lake Erie."

State Sen. George Borrello says the cost of this renewable energy outweighs any of its benefits.

"This is the drinking water for over 11 million people, including most people in Western New York. This is too much risk. There's no reason to do this. The cost of doing industrial wind offshore is many multiples more than doing it on land. I'm not a fan of land based wind turbines, but it's many multiples more, and the electricity that produces is much costlier than land based wind turbines," said Borrello in an interview with WBEN. "There's no reason to do other than virtue signaling on the part of Gov. Hochul and those radical environmentalists and people will profit from this and that's the real issue here. This is about money. It's not about climate change."