Wind turbine fire in Mechanicsville could cost farmer millions

Credit: By Jackson Valenti · Published: Aug. 16, 2024 at kcrg.com ~~

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The damage left behind is the responsibility of the land owner.

A farm in Mechanicsville must clean up its third wind turbine fire in less than a year and a half.

Lightning strikes caused all three.

Now the farm’s owners are trying to figure out what’s next.

A Cedar County ordinance requires wind turbines that aren’t producing energy must be taken down within the year.

While the turbine’s owners have to take care of that, the damage left behind is the responsibility of the land owner.

After the wind turbine’s blade fell to the ground, debris from the turbine coated the surrounding farmland.

“I don’t really know how you ever clean it up, especially since the longer you wait the harder it is to cleanup. And since there’s so much still here I don’t know what we’re gonna do with it,” said Sally Freeman, the farm’s owner.

Freeman is now dealing with her third turbine fire, and she’s learned from experience that cleanup takes forever.

“We don’t really have a timeline yet, and we don’t really know the method by which they want to take it down,” Freeman said.

She also learned the cleanup the wind energy companies do isn’t perfect.

Previous cleanups left Freeman’s cornfield littered with wires and fiberglass, and the industrial equipment used to remove the last turbine is still taking up space.

All the fiberglass and waste in the field means she can’t use the land, a loss that loss costs a lot of money.

“So between like additional costs to us … additional costs to and damages to our soil, I would say it’s in the millions,” Freeman said.

Days after the fire, the fallen blade is still smoldering and chunks of the structure are still blowing off in the wind.

Freeman’s worried those pieces of fiberglass could break the farm’s equipment. She already knows she won’t be able to sell any corn from the affected area.

“Because of the storms that followed the fire and the fact that there’s now been two fires on the same turbine, three fires in the same field, I mean there’s probably at least 1000 acres that have been affected by these two turbines,” Freeman said.

Freeman said she isn’t against wind energy, but she said there needs to be legislation to speed up the cleanup process.

Source: By Jackson Valenti · Published: Aug. 16, 2024 at kcrg.com

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