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The MET masts used by developers to gauge wind speeds are the vanguard for every wind farm disaster: no MET mast data, no wind farm. As soon as they go up, the locals circle their wagons, marshal their forces and declare war on the developer. No surprises there.
With the wind industry on the ropes in Australia, developers are quietly pulling down their MET masts at places like Robertstown in South Australia – much to the delight of locals (see our post here).
Wherever MET masts get the chop, the locals breathe a sigh of relief as it signals the developer’s defeat and a victory for a community under threat.
But there are a growing number of cases where locals haven’t been prepared to wait for the developer to remove their masts on the grounds of defeat.
In a “we’ll never surrender” move, farmers from Maine have joined efforts elsewhere to hit wind power outfits where it hurts – grabbing their weapons of choice (a selection of spanners) in order to help a local MET mast rest safely on the ground.
Here’s a story from Bangor, Maine of a community taking its future out of the hands of a bent planning system that decided to change the rules in favour of a lying, cheating wind farm developer – AFTER a court scotched the development.
Owner says collapse of meteorological tower at site of proposed Clifton wind farm an act of vandalism
Bangor Daily News
Nok-Noi Ricker & Ryan McLaughlin
9 December 2014
The meteorological tower atop Pisgah Mountain, erected in 2010 to collect data about where there was enough wind to harvest, was found damaged Sunday.
CLIFTON, Maine — Paul Fuller of Bangor and his business partner Mike Smith went to Pisgah Mountain on Sunday to cut down Christmas trees to decorate their homes for the holidays and discovered a meteorological tower on the hilltop Fuller owns had collapsed.
“The nuts and bolts from one [support] cable had been removed on one side and dropped it,” Fuller said Monday, after filing a report with Maine State Police Trooper Tucker Bonnevie.
“It’s a $30,000 piece of equipment that is destroyed,” said Fuller, who believes the slender 196-foot tall metal structure was downed as an act of vandalism.
Bonnevie said Tuesday that the tower had fallen, but “there’s no evidence at this time that any crime was committed.”
“We don’t know for sure that it’s vandalism,” Bonnevie said. “We don’t know if [the bolts] just gave way or somebody actually loosened them.”
Just one of around a dozen wires securing the tower came down, the trooper said.
Fuller and his wife in 2009 purchased 270 acres on Pisgah Mountain, which is located just south of Rebel Hill Road, and shortly thereafter approached the Clifton Planning Board about placing the meteorological tower on the hilltop to collect data about wind currents.
Fuller said the tower’s data demonstrated that there is plenty of wind to operate a wind farm, and in 2010 he submitted a five-turbine plan with the town.
The $25 million wind farm project was originally permitted in Oct. 2011, but local farmers Peter and Julie Beckford appealed the project’s permit and in December 2013 a Superior Court judge said the land use code was not followed.
The Pisgah Mountain developers filed an appeal in January to the state’s highest court to overturn the judge’s decision.
“We’re still waiting for the decision,” Fuller said Monday.
In the meantime, local planners have changed the wind farm ordinance by removing and adding items mentioned as hurdles in the Superior Court business and consumer judge’s decision.
“This doesn’t stop us in any way,” Fuller said. “It’s just frustrating because somebody [resorted] to vandalism.”
“There were not prints anywhere near the site or around it,” said Bonnevie.
The property is not gated and does not have security cameras, and “he lets anybody and everybody hunt there,” the trooper said of Fuller, adding he understands the proposed wind tower project is a controversial issue in town.
“At this point there is no evidence, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t vandalism or criminal mischief,” Bonnevie said.
“It’s not an active investigation, but the investigation is ongoing,” the trooper said later. “I’m still asking around town.”
Bangor Daily News
So, hopeful turbine host, Paul Fuller is a bit peeved that his neighbours have downed a wind power outfit’s MET mast.
It’s pretty clear that Fuller doesn’t live anywhere near his hill-top hunting ground, but his neighbours, farmers Peter and Julie Beckford, among hundreds of others, most certainly do.
Fuller is keen to pocket 30 pieces of silver with scant regard to those who will suffer for his pitiful betrayal: at most, he would receive $10,000 per year, per turbine – in exchange for which he’ll render plenty of his neighbours’ homes sonic torture traps and uninhabitable; and, in any event, send the value of their properties plummeting.
Cute, too the efforts by the local “planners” to shift the goal posts in favour of the wind power developer AFTER the Superior Court had canned the project back in December 2013. Why play by the rules, when it’s far simpler to change them, retrospectively? That way you get to ride roughshod over communities, under the pretence of development “progress”.
It’s precisely that kind of insidious institutional corruption that has led to a breakout of sabotage and destruction being wreaked by community defenders in Scotland (see our post here) and in Ontario (see our post here).
STT predicts that 2015 will see an escalation of action by those people set upon by rapacious wind power outfits, turbine hosts blessed with the same moral compass as Judas and bent planning “systems” filled with eco-fascists eager to destroy the communities they’re paid handsomely to serve and protect.
While some, like Paul Fuller, might call dropping a MET mast “vandalism”, at least the people involved can be forgiven for having a solid moral (if not, legal) justification for their actions: defending homes and protecting families from harm has rarely been looked at with disdain, usually attracts plaudits and, where it results in a criminal offence, is excused under the law as “self-defence”.
Contrast the clearly understandable stance taken by Bangor’s farmers – facing a direct threat to their livelihoods, homes and health – with the “exuberant political activism” on display in the Peruvian desert last week; orchestrated by a team of nutcases, who had jetted in fresh from Uni campuses all around the world, for the purpose of “raising awareness” about imminent Global incineration.
Those of the hard-‘green’-left have been reduced to facile diatribes, as they seek to justify the consequences of the “awareness raising” efforts of their Overlords, Greenpeace: efforts that resulted in irreparable damage to highly significant sites of ancient Peruvian cultural heritage and artefacts – all in the name of making an infantile visual point about their ludicrous desire to go “100% renewable” and their ultimate goal of covering the entire globe with giant fans (well, your patch of it, not theirs).
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Greenpeace protest ‘permanently damaged’ Peru’s Nazca Lines, government says
The Wall Street Journal
Robert Kozak
16 December 2014
Drones sent up to study the Nazca Lines in Peru show that a protest against global warming by the environment action group Greenpeace permanently damaged an area around the famed geoglyphs, the government says.
Culture Minister Diana Alvarez-Calderon said yesterday that evidence gathered during an investigation by the government will be used as part of a legal suit against Greenpeace.
“The damage done is irreparable and the apologies offered by the environmental group aren’t enough,” she said.
Greenpeace has apologised for laying out big yellow letters on the desert floor beside the geoglyph of a giant hummingbird. The letters read: “Time for change! The future is renewable.”
The protest took place last week during a high-level UN-sponsored meeting taking place in Lima aimed at stopping global climate warming.
Peru says the activists damaged an area around the hummingbird by grinding rocks into the sandy soil. Access to the area around the lines is strictly prohibited.
President Ollanta Humala has called the Greenpeace actions a “lack of respect for our cultural patrimony and Peruvian laws”.
The ministry wanted the activists to be detained before they could leave Peru, but a judge initially refused to hold any of the activists and they are believed to have left Peru.
Greenpeace has promised to fully co-operate with any investigation and said it is willing to “face fair and reasonable consequences”. Greenpeace’s International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo met with Peruvian officials in Lima yesterday.
The Nazca Lines are a mysterious series of huge animal, imaginary human and plant symbols etched into the ground sometime between 500BC and AD500. The hummingbird design is one of the most famous and best preserved of the lines.
Experts disagree on why the lines were made, but some say they may have had ritual astronomical functions.
The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, or UNESCO, placed the lines on its World Heritage List in 1994.
The Wall Street Journal
What was that we were saying about justifying vandalism?
With its mindless zealots hell-bent on hijacking energy
policy and smashing the World’s poor, indeed, it is.
STOP THESE THINGS 
Funny how it was assumed right from the start, that this was vandalism. If it was, well then, Good for you Maine!!
I don’t see it as vandalism. I see it as a last resort for the people to stand up and say, NO!, and without harming one person, place or thing. Only thing I see harmed from the downing of the tower was someone’s personal pocket book.
I’ve personally heard from a few sets of lips, directly to my ears, that should an IWT be built close to a home, there’s a old Vietnam rifle waiting for it. Some would say this extreme, and maybe it is. What choices are deemed appropriate however? Trying to fight at the level of government? How can one do this if you’re spending your days at work, feeding your family and haven’t the resources as a well-oiled green greedy scheme? What the heck do they expect!
People are just plain sick and tired of these mass destructive, intrusive, piles of bird slicing, infrasound-generating, toxic steel idols.
Those met towers are nothing but a precurser to build IWT’s. They couldn’t care less if there’s sufficient winds in any given area. They only put them up to serve as sort of an icon. “See, we’re measuring your area for wind speeds” – bullsh-t. They put them anywhere they can get a signed contract and make money, period.