Mechanical failure causes blade to fall off wind turbine in Boston

A blade has fallen off a wind turbine outside the city of Gloucester in Massachusetts, US, due to unknown causes.

The Gloucester Fire Department responded on Sunday morning to a report that a mechanical failure at a wind turbine had caused one of the three turbine blades to fall from the 492-foot turbine.

Located at the Blackburn Industrial Park and owned and operated by Applied Materials, the remaining two blades on the turbine show no signs of imminent structural concerns.

According to Applied Materials, the built-in safety mechanisms of the turbine acted as intended and stopped the turbine once a fault had been detected and the remaining two blades have been locked into place, ensuring they are under far less stress than when they are operational.

In the immediate aftermath of the discovery of the fallen turbine blade, the Gloucester Fire Department was forced to close off a 450-foot collapse zone as a precaution and close a portion of a nearby road. These were quickly re-opened, though an exclusion zone remains in place on Applied Materials property.

The incident is the latest in a spate of turbine blade failures or tower collapses to happen around the globe in recent weeks, including in Australia.

The Australian incident, reported last month, involved a wind turbine at Iberdrola Australia’s Alinta wind farm in Western Australia, which buckled in half and fell into a canola field, causing the 89MW project to be temporarily shut down.

These incidents, which have occurred at both long-running and new wind projects, remain small in number – and minimal in the short and long-term damage caused – relative to the huge amounts of wind energy capacity being installed worldwide.