Broken Offshore Wind Blade Pieces Wash Onto Nantucket Beach

(Bloomberg) -- Investigators are probing the cause of a damaged offshore wind turbine blade that sent debris washing ashore at Nantucket Beach and shut down swimming in the area.

The incident occurred Saturday evening at the 800-megawatt Vineyard Wind project under construction near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, prompting the probe by federal officials, developers Avangrid Inc. and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners P/S, and GE Vernova Inc., which manufactured the Haliade-X turbines used at the site. Operations at the site have been suspended while investigations are underway, and authorities closed Nantucket’s south shore to swimming for three days.

The episode threatens to intensify calls for more scrutiny of offshore wind projects — including from presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who has been critical of the ventures as he seeks a second term in the White House.

Vineyard Wind LLC said it set up a safety perimeter of 500 meters (547 yards) around the affected turbine and worked with the US Coast Guard to alert mariners. The company deployed workers to recover fiberglass fragments and other blade pieces on Nantucket and is using aircraft and vessel patrols to find floating debris.

“GE, as the project’s turbine and blade manufacturer and installation contractor, will now be conducting the analysis into the root cause of the incident,” Vineyard Wind said in a statement on its website.

No injuries were reported, but operations are shut down until further notice, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said in an emailed statement. A team from the agency is on location to work with Vineyard Wind on an analysis of the cause and next steps.

The Haliade-X turbines being installed at the project are mammoth structures — with an 853-foot span that’s almost the height of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. GE Vernova said in an emailed statement that it is investigating while working to contain and remove the debris safely and efficiently.

Vineyard Wind began sending power to the grid in January, though it is still under construction. Once completed, the project is set to encompass 62 turbines spinning off the Massachusetts coast, with 800 megawatts of electric generation capacity — enough to power about 400,000 East Coast homes.

(Updates with detail on swimming closure from first paragraph.)

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