Today’s story about multiple fatalities at a Russian dam-construction site offers an opportunity to note a dark side to the noisy contraptions known as windmills — from which, to hear our president tell it, so many Little Green Jobs are to flow. Just like in Spain (chuckle).

Since 2002, some 60 people have died in freak windmill accidents, according to the UK-based Caithness Windfarm Information Forum, which keeps data on wind-power-related accidents and incidents. In a “Summary of Wind Turbine Accident Data to 30 June 2009” [PDF], they claim 17 fatalities among the general public and 43 worker fatalities (usually related to the windmill itself, such as falls; I exclude the one suicide captured by this figure; presumably it wasn’t caused by having to listen to the things all day and night or, at least, whenever the wind was blowing).

So add this to the bill for these machines sold with the silly line “the wind is free!” The coal sitting on your land is as free as the wind blowing above it, of course, but both require tremendous capital and incur other costs in order to turn them into power. All such information is necessary to have an honest comparison between the sources.