FINDLAY, Ohio — If you're used to seeing the wind turbines off of I-75 in Findlay, you'll notice a new problem for the next few weeks.
Just before noon on Monday, a blade on the southernmost wind turbine at the North Findlay Wind Campus, operated by Findlay-based One Energy, broke off.
One Energy crews were on site within 10 minutes and no local emergency responders were needed.
CEO Jereme Kent said he's never seen a blade fail like this in his 20 years in the industry.
"Big machines do fail like any other big machine inside of a power plant. Obviously, with wind turbines, the failure is far more visible than it is inside of the walls of a power plant," said Kent. "Blade failures are extremely rare. in my 20-year career, of all the turbines I've been a part of, I hadn't had a blade failure yet."
One Energy crews will be busy inspecting the 140-foot-long and 13,000-pound blade and turbine from the ground, inside and in the air using drones.
They said this blade failure is the perfect example of why the regulations for wind turbine safe distances are so important.
"It's something that we do have plans in place for and it's fortunate that as this event happened, it resulted in no injuries, no damage to anything external to the site. Nothing left our property," said Kent.
It's a chance to improve on current safety protocols when constructing and maintaining these turbines.
"What that source was is really going to guide us in our steps going forward," said Katie Treadway, head of regulatory compliance at One Energy. "Absolutely as we learn things, we're going to change depending on what it is we find out."
In the meantime, One Energy has decided to keep all 29 of its other turbines offline until it is absolutely clear this is a one-time incident and not an ongoing problem.
"To be clear, we have no indication that the rest of our fleet is not safe, but we're going to start from a position of zero and get back to where we know the stuff that we have running is safe," said Kent.
No clear timeframe has been set to bring the rest of the turbines back online.
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