Worker injured in crane collapse

GRAND MEADOW – Officials from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration are en route to rural Mower County after a man was injured Friday morning when a $5 million crane malfunctioned near Grand Meadow while working on a wind turbine.

An unnamed employee of Dawes Rigging and Crane Rental was operating the 310-foot crane just after 7 a.m. when an automatic shut off safety feature malfunctioned, causing it to tip over and crush the crane’s cab with the man inside, according to Mower County Sheriff Terese Amazi. The crane is believed to be totaled.

The man was airlifted to Rochester by Mayo One for treatment of unknown injuries. Steve Freckmann, Dawes’ General Manager in Elk Mound, Wis., declined to identify the injured employee, but said he’s believed to be in stable condition as of noon on Friday.

“Right now we’ve got people en route to the site and we can’t really make any type of statement until we know what happened,” said Freckmann, whose father created the company that’s been servicing the Midwest since 1947. “I’m sitting here five, six hours from the job site and, unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of answers right now.”

The U.S. Department of Labor updated its crane regulations in 2010 – the first refresh since 1971 – in an attempt to improve worker safety. One of the major changes required crane operators to be certified in the equipment they were using, which was aimed at reducing deaths from about 100 per year.

The Dawes crane crew was hired by EDP Renewables to repair gear boxes at the 43-turbine Mower Wind Energy Center, according to EDP spokesman Steve Stengel. The wind project was built in 2006 about five miles south of Grand Meadow. It creates about 99 megawatts of energy and has proved to be a strong economic windfall for Mower County.

Minnesota has the seventh most installed wind capacity in the country with nearly 3,000 megawatts, according to an April 2014 report from the American Wind Energy Association. Mower County currently has 284 turbines spinning, many of which stand about 400 feet tall and are readily visible while traveling on Interstate 90.

Amazi, OSHA and Dawes are all still investigating to determine what caused the malfunction. Answers may not be available until next week, Freckmann said.

“Right now our main concern is securing the crane to make sure we don’t have any other issues,” Freckmann said.

While RES Americas is in the midst of building a new 200-megawatt project in Mower County, which will be purchased by Xcel Energy upon completion, some people are critical of the wind turbine proliferation.

Concerns about wind power include shadow flicker, stray voltage, negative impacts on birds and bats, and myriad of other issues. Critics have also leveled charges of inefficiencies and frequent breakdowns for their opposition; a crane was previously hired in May 2013 to repair a 400-foot tall wind turbine near Dexter that was struck by lightning.

Goodhue County citizens spent six figures successfully opposing a controversial 78-megawatt wind project once backed by Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens. The five-year permitting battle created national headlines and saw project developers spend more than $15 million trying to get the project built before it came to an unceremonious end last fall.

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Correction

A crane operator was injured Friday while repairing wind turbines in NextEra Energy’s Mower Wind Energy Center. The company was misidentified in an article on page A1 Saturday.

Monday, August 11, 2014

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