Vineyard Wind shut down after turbine failure, "sharp fiberglass shards" wash ashore on Nantucket beaches

By Matt Schooley
Updated on: July 17, 2024 / 8:35 AM EDT / CBS Boston

NANTUCKET – The federal government has ordered the Vineyard Wind farm to shut down until further notice because of a turbine blade failure this weekend.

Several beaches were closed on Tuesday while crews worked to clean up "large floating debris and fiberglass shards" from the broken wind turbine blade off the coast of Martha's Vineyard. A total of six south shore Nantucket beaches were closed to swimming due to debris that washed ashore.

"You can walk on the beaches, however we strongly recommend you wear footwear due to sharp, fiberglass shards and debris on the beaches," the Nantucket Harbormaster said.

Vineyard Wind operations shut down​

Late Tuesday afternoon, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said all operations are shut down until further notice.

"A team of BSEE experts is onsite to work closely with Vineyard Wind on an analysis of the cause of the incident and next steps," the agency said in a statement.


A Vineyard Wind turbine WORLDVIEW FILMS

Vineyard Wind turbine breaks​

The Vineyard Wind turbine suffered blade damage Saturday night. No one was hurt, but large chunks of the blade began washing onto the beaches in the area in the days that followed.

"Vineyard Wind is fully committed to a swift and safe recovery of all debris, with an unwavering focus on community safety and environmental protection," Vineyard Wind said in a statement. "As part of its immediate action plan, Vineyard Wind communicated with officials on Nantucket to inform them of the presence of debris and recovery efforts on the southern-facing beaches of the island."


A worker cleans up pieces of wind turbine blade that washed ashore on Nantucket. CBS BOSTON

Crews could be seen Tuesday afternoon removing pieces of fiberglass from the beach.

Vineyard Wind says the cause of the breakage is unknown at this time. According to WBZ meteorologist Jacob Wycoff, there was some bad weather in the area, including gusty wind and lightning.

GE, the turbine and blade manufacturer and installation contractor, will be doing analysis for the root cause of the incident.

Nantucket beaches closed for cleanup​

Vineyard Wind said it has two recovery teams consisting of four people on Nantucket to remove the debris.

The turbine blades are made of non-toxic fiberglass. Fragments can vary in size and are usually green or white.

Vineyard Wind said that while the fiberglass is not hazardous to people or the environment, beachgoers should not pick up the debris on their own.

Source (Archive)

 

[Toji Suzuhara]

What's with all of the industrial accidents? Is this the late-80s Soviet Union or what?

 

[Dr. Ricearoni]

What's with all of the industrial accidents? Is this the late-80s Soviet Union or what?

Nobody tell him

 

[JJLiautaud]

The once was a man from Nantucket...
Some one cleverer than I can come up with a funny limerick

 

[Curzon Dax-sama]

"We continue to fuck up the enviroment to protect the enviroment!!"

Just go nuclear, holy fucking shit.

 

[Chilson]

"We continue to fuck up the enviroment to protect the enviroment!!"

Just go nuclear, holy fucking shit.

Your acting like protecting the environment was ever the goal of the environmental movement. It was always about creating a power base of useful idiots and grifting tax dollars using that power base.

 

[Quixotic Man]

If only we had some kind of energy source that was clean, reliable, and safe when done properly. But nah, we should ignore it because Soviet ineptitude continues to ruin everything.

 

[Day of the Cope]

Your acting like protecting the environment was ever the goal of the environmental movement. It was always about creating a power base of useful idiots and grifting tax dollars using that power base.

The whole thing is basically a pump and dump where they to inflate the value of penny stocks, cash out once it reaches its peak, and leave everyone else holding the bag. It's the same thing with the "Beyond Meat" bullshit.

 

[Whoopsie Daisy]

I've seen the aftermath of a turbine blade hit it's own pole. It isn't pretty. Though it is very, very funny.

 

[Breadbassket]

The once was a man from Nantucket...
Some one cleverer than I can come up with a funny limerick

There was once a man from Nantucket
He came to the beach to collect shells to put in a bucket
A turbine broke down
There were shards all over the ground
Vineyard Wind told him to suck it

 

[Cybertonia]

The once was a man from Nantucket...

There once was a man from Nantucket,
Who had sex with your mom, he said "I'm drunk, fuck it!"
But he had to cover her face with a bucket.

 

[JosephStalin]

Gee, let's hope some of those 'migrants' who came to Martha's Vineyard are helping to clean up the mess, in gratitude for their new life in America. Who the fuck am I kidding? They probably ran like hell when they were asked to assist in the cleanup.

 

[Bonesjones]

Gee, let's hope some of those 'migrants' who came to Martha's Vineyard are helping to clean up the mess, in gratitude for their new life in America. Who the fuck am I kidding? They probably ran like hell when they were asked to assist in the cleanup.

You think they all weren't immediately dropped off at the nearest port and told to fuck off?

 

[Pilgrim of Grace]

What's with all of the industrial accidents? Is this the late-80s Soviet Union or what?

A potpourri of enshittification & competency crisis.

Critical infrastructure is worse. In the US anyway. Most of it is closing in on a century old.

 

[thx1138]

So the uber-rich on Martha's Vineyard pitched a screaming hissy-fit for years, and that includes Teddy Kennedy before his brain fell out due to a tumor, about those turbines. All of these people pushed for green initiatives before that even had a name, and when they said "Fine, we're going to put them up in the harbor," oh how they flipped their shit. They fought the construction of these things for years. Suddenly what they were pushing on other people had bad environmental consequences, y'know, for sea-birds. And they something or the other native fishing lands (the last Indians left in like the 1700s), and there were even people claiming they made a subsonic hum that made people sick. They pulled out all the stops to keep this from happening.

Now, personally, I think damn wind farms are ugly, inefficient, and wasteful. The plastic rotor blades, when they wear out? They can't recycle those - they go in landfills, where they can leach microplastics into the soil for eternity. But the people who live near Martha's Vineyard and so on, they were more than happy to vote for legislatures who'd shit up the rest of the country with the useless things. So watching them have to eat shit and get a wind farm in their own back yard was hilarious.

Unfortunately this means they now have casus belli to have them shut down. I'd suggest "Now maybe they've learned how bad these things are for everyone," but that would require me to think that rich baby boomers are interested in anything other than fuck you got mine, which I know they're not.

 

[Alligator Alcatraz]

"We continue to fuck up the enviroment to protect the enviroment!!"

Just go nuclear, holy fucking shit.

Nope. This is New England, the same region where retards in Fall River got upset over a coal power plant having "nuclear power plant-looking" cooling towers. Joe Biden showed up and had to reassure the locals other environmental-friendly options were being explored. Sam Hyde must have known how special the locals were.

 

[teriyakiburns]

The once was a man from Nantucket...
Some one cleverer than I can come up with a funny limerick

There once was a man from nantucket,
Who tried to catch wind in a bucket,
It caught too much air
Broke and spread everywhere
And he said "don't like it? You can all suck it."

 

[demicolon]

Get rid of asbestos only to replace it with fiberglass. Womp womp.

 

[Bland Crumbs]

What's with all of the industrial accidents? Is this the late-80s Soviet Union or what?

This is more of an inevitable than an accident.

There is a reason that people in other shore states rose up to fight the construction of this shit. Ya know other than all the sea life washing up on shore...

 

[Mechanical Pencil]

What is there to even investigate, the damned things self destruct all the time - when it comes to lifespan, turbines are garbage compared to other means of power generation. If this wasn't a case of failure of maintenance/replacement leading to a catastrophic breakdown I'll eat my hat.

Kinda related: went to visit a buddy last year and an absolutely huge turbine graveyard has popped up in their town. I'm talking hundreds of decommissioned blades and poles littering up a large swath of land, sitting there being VERY green, MUCH environmentally friendly and just so very re/upcycleable. Wow. Which is why they're sitting there, unusable for anything, after not even 30 years of use. Spending god only knows how much money and carbon to construct, transport, erect, "maintain”, decommission, transport (again), before being dumped in a lot is clearly the only smart move for our energy needs!

Wind turbines make me want to fedpost in a bad way.