PAXTON (News-Gazette) — The cause of a wind turbine collapse Thursday night at Pioneer Trail Wind Farm near Paxton remains under investigation, according to the wind farm owner RWE Renewables.
RWE spokesman Matt Tulis said employees noticed a single turbine leaning in an abnormal direction when they arrived on site Wednesday.
“We started an analysis to discover what the root cause was, but we’re at a very early stage of that,” Tulis said. “We don’t want to speculate on that until we get the analysis done.”
He didn’t know what time the turbine came down the next day, he said, but he was informed about it around 7 p.m. Thursday.
The turbine wasn’t operational at the time it came down, Tulis said.
The turbine has sensors that stopped the operation when they detected something was wrong, and when operations and maintenance employees arrived on site Wednesday and saw the turbine leaning, they cut off the power source, he said.
“This was an extremely isolated case for us,” Tulis said.
RWE has 35 wind farms across the U.S. with more than 3,000 turbines in operation, “and this is the first time we’ve seen something like this with our fleet,” he said.
The turbine is cordoned off and employees are on site making sure nobody from the public accesses the site, he said.
The turbine is on private property, and the access road is blocked off, he said.
“We’re very safety conscious, so we want to keep it that way,” Tulis said.
How long it will take to get the collapsed turbine back in operation depends on what the analysis finds, he said.
There are a total 94 turbines at this wind farm, each capable of producing 1.6 megawatts per hour at full capacity, Tulis said.
The rest of the turbines on site remain operational, he said.
It sounded like thunder
Kirsten Wyatt and her husband, Brandon, were in their home watching television between 5:40 and 5:30 Thursday afternoon when they heard a sound similar to thunder.
The turbine had crashed to the ground about a quarter of a mile north of their house.
Someone employed by RWE Renewables had been on the scene since the turbine had been reported leaning earlier, and the Wyatts went out to make sure the employee was OK.
“Since this has happened, there’s been a rotation of Ford County law enforcement and windmill company” personnel who have been frequenting the area, Kirsten Wyatt said.
The leaning tower of Paxton
Terry Lewis, who lives about a mile west of the Wyatts, said he noticed the turbine leaning early Thursday.
“Yesterday morning I walked out about 6:30,” Lewis said. “I just happened to glance at it, and I saw one leaning. I thought, ‘Boy, this is big trouble here. I don’t know how they’re going to repair it really. You can’t just put a chain on it and pull it back straight.”
Lewis said it was obviously a foundational problem.
“I don’t know whether there’s perhaps some sand or something underneath there that collapsed,” he said. “I’m sure they did soil tests before they put this down. It really surprised me when I saw it tipping like that. I know when they were putting those in, they have one heck of a foundation underneath them.”Ford County Board Vice Chairman Cindy Ihrke said she is hoping to get drone footage of the site to determine the extent of the debris field.
“We’d like a report and kind of an update on what they’re going to do,” Ihrke said. “They’re supposed to decommission” the turbines. “Of course this one decommissioned itself. We want to know what their plan is.
“You still have to clean it up. In our ordinance, when they take the turbine down, they’re supposed to take the concrete and the underground wires out at least 4 feet below ground.”
Ihrke and her mother-in-law, Ann Ihrke, also a member of the Ford County Board, fought for greater setbacks “and better regulations to protect the county and the taxpayers.”
Added Cindy Ihrke: “My feeling is that they need to be sited safely, especially for non-participating homeowners. This is a good example of why.”
She said she was concerned when the Illinois General Assembly recently passed legislation that would take controls from how close turbines could be sited next to private property away from local governments.
Ihrke said the legislators “didn’t do their homework” and held no hearings on the changes.
“In my opinion, they’re going to put people in danger because they did not do adequate research,” she said.
