Rookery South ERF and Millennium County Park

Rookery South Energy Recovery Facility

On Thursday the 20th of March, I began to scan the map for other sites of waste might be accessible. I discovered a site not far from Buckingham with a short train ride from Bletchley over to Stewartby.

From Stewartby, I traveled directly south along the public path then veered to the east where the thin grey line curves off on the All Trails footpath map. This was also a public gravel footpath that the locals use, that leads up to a vantagepoint of the facility. It is bordered by the plant, lakes and a swath of brush/forest not far from the busy train track.

It was quite a stormy day, cold and wet. I was pelted with rain and the winds were extremely hard to navigate with capturing clear sound. There was not much initially to the soundscape and once again I could not hear any process of incineration off the plant itself. I did manage to climb up the path and sit down behind a tangle of thorns to deaden the winds and after a few minutes a rythmic low hum pervaded the soundscape. I have no idea what this low frequency, intermittent sound was and it was over after a few minutes. Later in the day I heard it again far from the plant while walking on the other side of the train tracks at Millennium Park. Apart from this, the distant hum of trucks was all that I could hear coming and going from the plant. As I sat motionless, monitoring the sonic signals, a curious looking deer from behind a fence jumped out and frantically stared at me for several seconds. It had never seen anything like a human/microphone hybrid before, me with my large furry blimp and strange wired lavs. Conversely, I had never seen anything like it before. The deer I am used to in America are slender and fleet and this one looked a bit tiny and plump. Turns out, it was an invasive species called a muntjac. After this encounter and the downpour of rain, I decided to uproot and explore the paths winding around the plant.

Upon traveling the road south toward the plant, to my right I could see a massive wind turbine. I was curious to see how close I could actually get to the structure as I assumed it would be chain off and inaccessible to the public. I decided to walk on the other side of the plant, through Millennium County park. As it turns out, a path led down to the lake where I had to perform some acrobatics through thorn bushes to get to a bit of a clearing where I could see the turbine. From here I took long takes of sound recordings, aiming the shotgun mic, a tin can mic, and placing stereo lavs amongst the branches that waved in the wind.

The sound was hypnotic- a low pulse of "whooshing" energy with a high frequency whipping sound of the blades piercing through. Massive gusts of wind rippled through the sparse wintery branches. As the gusts grew larger, I was recording wind through the various swaying material bodies of the location, as well as wind being captured by the turbine. I could not hear much else and I spent a long while in the position. Determined to explore and see if I could get closer I exited and follow the contour along the lake. I was indeed getting closer and this key note sound became much more pronounced in the soundscape. Eventually through the swampy muck I emerged at the entrance to Millennium park. From here the sound was in high detail and the turbine was monsterously looming. One could walk directly up to the turbine with no fencing. My initial thought was to put the contact mics on the turbine itself to get a direct recording of its vibrational thrums. Luckily I had walked around it first to find out this is potentially life threatening.

Even more detailed was the dominating, overwhelmingly loud, twofold frequency of the turbines. Walking around the perimeter of it, out about 10 meters, with my back turned, the sound began to play tricks on me in terms of its positionality in the soundscape. At points, the stereo signal of the turbines was clearly separated and listening to this expression kicked off another curious, hypnotic hold on me. The intense high frequency whipping sound seemed to be expressing itself in front of me, not behind me. I proceded to record for a few hours with the scrap mics in various positions.

The reason I am interested in the wind turbines is the fact that, despite being a "green" source of energy, suffer from the same problems with end of life discard. Nothing, it seems, can claim to be truly sustainable, though in terms of the extractive and combustive damage of oil and its derivatives are far more hazardous to global sustainablity. However, the Cambridge study, alluded to in the article, seems to point to a hopefull solution to the blade problem of turbines.