If you’re like me, you found yourself four-wheeling through section line roads at 5am or so Saturday morning. I had the inclination to sneak in a quick photo jaunt before my family woke up, and there were some noteworthy events in the morning sky I wanted to pursue. While I didn’t see any planetary alignments as promised, I did find plenty of other neat things during my voyage. One of them was this broken wind turbine near Wilton.

For some reason one of the blades delaminated in spectacular fashion, making an enormous mess and putting this expensive piece of hardware out of commission. If the numbers I heard are correct, a blade replacement is about a $150,000 job. That’s presuming that there was no further damage due to its failure.

Sometimes when things fail they REALLY fail. That would be the case here. Rather than simply splitting down the middle, as I’ve seen before, this one appears to have shredded itself quite handily. Maybe that means it failed while rotating. Maybe it sustained wind damage after the failure. I’m not sure…all I know is that it is definitely “busted.”

Here’s the last time a blade failed at the Wilton/Regan area site. As you can see, the blade simply split in half and then collapsed under its own weight. There are no shredded chunks hanging like this most recent failure.

This reminds me: when this first failure occurred, a friend of mine who was incarcerated at the time said that a rumor was going around the state penitentiary in which a UFO struck the turbine. Yeah…not likely. In any case, I thought that was an entertaining conspiracy theory!