Suffering from low-frequency noise in Holland 

I would like to inform you what happened to my life after I started hearing and feeling low frequency noise. Please read my story and understand why I supported the amendments in the proposed legislation if they include measurement of infrasound and low frequency noise.

My name is Elisabeth Jonkman, I am a women of 55 years old and mother of two sons, 24 and 19 years old now. I lived in the middle of Holland, in Almere. 40 years ago the land was sea. When I came to live there in 1994 there were 94,000 inhabitants, nowadays there are nearly 200,000 inhabitants in this new city. Of course there are consequences for the energy-supplies. My city is still growing. There are more than 600 windturbines and their amount is still growing with much larger machines. Nuon/Vattenfall is also extending their energy supplies with new pipes and installations.

6 November 2011 a disaster happened in my life; I became vulnerable for low frequency noise. I don’t know why it happened to me, I only can guess. Since then my house is hell on earth. I constantly hear the sound of a kind of machine in my house. It is a pumping, rhythmic and low, heavy sound such as a big transport car near your house. It is nearly almost there: in my living-room, my toilet, my bathroom and the worst of all: my bedroom. It also gives a feeling of pressure in the air and it makes my body tremble. The area around my heart is trembling when I am in my house. It is very scaring and sometimes I think I just die if it doesn’t stop. At such terrible moments I have to go outside my house, even when it is late at night. Outside the house my body picks up the vibration and I can hear the sound in the air although it is not so damaging as it is in the house.

I still have a son to attend for, he is autistic and not ready to lose his mother yet. You may ask yourself: “Why doesn’t she move and go to live elsewhere?” As a matter of fact: I did so 5 months ago. The disaster continues, being sensitized for LFN. Holland is a small and crowded country with lots of windturbines, gasfields and pipes, and lots of other industrial plants. There is no safe place for victims of LFN anymore.

My son told me he can hear the noise since he was born. His father and I, we never understood his complaints about his heart trembling and the noise in his head. We never understood why he shook his head as if he wanted to chase an insect, why he couldn’t sleep and why he was so tired. We visited doctors and they examined him but they never could find a reason for his complaints except that he was autistic. In 2011 the pieces of the puzzle fitted in.

My life has stopped, I cannot work any longer and I just try to survive and stay the mother that my sons need. There is hardly medical support for the victims of LFN. Doctors don`t know how to help us. Health Organizations ignore us. How can you help LFN victims if you do not listen to them and do not want to spend money on serious and independent investigation? Meanwhile, medical industry is doing good business prescribing antidepressives and antipsychotics. In the south of Holland (Limburg) they make you believe you are crazy and insist on behavior therapy. LFN is the new asbestos, taking this serious is lifesaving for generations to come.

There is an unknown amount of victims in Holland right now, registration fails. Desperate people contact the Foundation for Low Frequency Noise, the stories are distressing and degrading. www.laagfrequentgeluid.nl

I fear we are economic collateral damage, a proof of what is going to happen to lots of citizens who now think it is a thing that is never going to happen to them.

Elisabeth Jonkman
Victim of LFN (we call it LFG)
Doorwerth, The Netherlands, 14-3-2014