Wind turbine blade gets stuck between homes in small town on way to project site

A wind turbine blade being transported to a construction project in Iowa got stuck between two homes last week in a small town outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, highlighting once again the difficulties facing the wind energy industry in transporting components from production line to site.

While there have been no official confirmations of what happened last Tuesday, the mishap was widely reported by local media outlets.

Speaking to local outlet KDKA-TV, Don Kepple, the supervisor of the small township of Derry, said that the driver had been driving an approved route from nearby Ebensburg on his way to Iowa.

Kepple also explained that, from the front of the truck to the rear point of the turbine blade, the entire load measured 159 feet, 4 inches long – or nearly 50 metres.

The route, said to have been approved by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT), took the driver through Derry, causing him to wedge the wind turbine blade between two houses – after the driver had already caused minor damage to a local towing company.

“I come up, and there’s the beam, there’s that wind turbine sitting on that corner to that corner, inches from going into each house,” Mark Piantine, Derry Township’s fire chief, told KDKA-TV.

The route was not going to get any easier, either. According to Piantine, if the driver hadn’t attempted to pass through Derry, “once you got down at the underpass, he was never getting through there. He’d never made the turn because the tail was so long,” Piantine said.

In attempting to extricate himself and the turbine blade from its predicament, Kepple told KDKA-TV that the driver was forced to reverse nearly a mile.

The problems continued to mount at this point while the driver waited for a new permit and route to be approved.

“While he was here at the building, the rear axle on the trailer steered by a Honda Motor, which is remote controlled by somebody standing and holding it, and he had trouble with his motor while he was in the building,” Kepple said.

“He was here for a few hours ’till he got it running. And then later in the early evening, he was on Route 22 at the red light by Livermore Road, and apparently the Honda Motor failed, and he couldn’t make the turn.”

The eventual route that the driver took to restart his nearly 700-mile journey to Iowa was, apparently, the route he should have been given in the first place, according to Kepple.

This is at least the second wind energy transport issue to be reported in the United States in the last few weeks, following a report late last month of a wind turbine blade “falling off” the back of a truck trailer in Washington County, Maryland.

It was later confirmed the blade had straddled the highway, apparently due to loss of control of the rear motor.

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