One would think this is a luxury home site with that gorgeous view of Mt. Katahdin! Nope, just a pad for one of forty wind turbines, each 389 feet high with aviation lights blinking 24/7.
Maine Drilling & Blasting drill at rest on a Sunday
The white tubes are inserted into drilled holes for dynamiting. They are blasting away this area to level it for a turbine pad. Note the slope.
They have created a quarry in the side of the mountain to mine the crushed rock for road building and pad sites. Most of Rollins is clay-ey loam on top of crumbly schist and shale.
The top of this mountain is being scalped. See my companions for perspective on scale.
Rock rubble pushed into the edge of the woods. Below are Long Pond and Egg Pond. There are more than 700 year round homes and seasonal camps on the Lincoln Lakes that will have noise impacts according to noise experts.
This is one damned big bulldozer!
Erosion spots like this all over the mountain. The silt washes into the watersheds of the ponds. Silt smothers spawning areas for certain fish like trout.
Clearcutting everywhere. Areas like this that are not permanently covered in gravel will be sprayed with herbicides to keep re-growth from happening. The herbicide residues end up washing down into the lakes, contaminating fish that the loons, ospreys, and eagles eat.
Rollins is being scalped and exposed topsoil left to erosion in the heavy November rains, evident in this photo.
Long Pond, Egg Pond, and part of Caribou Pond below Rollins Mt. On the Lee side, Silver Lake is impacted. In the Rocky Dundee area to the south, Mattanawcook, Folsom, Upper, Bill Green, and Madagascal Ponds will all be impacted.
Is this an extension of I-95? Wide roads are constructed throughout the project to get the huge components to the turbine pad sites. The environmental devastation that permanently alters these ancient ridges is far more damaging than any good that a fickle trickle of wind generated electricity does for the planet.
The rape of Rollins goes on for more than a thousand acres.
The network of roads interconnecting the four ridges of Rocky Dundee is just getting underway. There is a rush to build as much road system as possible before winter sets in or First Wind goes broke, whichever comes first.
Bulldozers sit waiting on Sunday to continue the push on to the ridge in the background. The deer and game birds that live in these hardwood ridges have been driven away. A travesty!
