If the Statue of Liberty were to keel over this morning, odds are someone would notice. There’d be chunks of car-sized debris dotted with confused seagulls, squawking at the mess. The grim scene might find itself in silhouette, bracing a sea of flickering light created by thousands of Instagramming tourists. Now consider this accident replayed with a couple of hundred-metre machetes spinning at high-speed. RIP seagulls and tourists.
This is a situation faced by those living around wind farms when something goes catastrophically wrong with the steel and concrete monsters lurking in their paddocks. Inevitably, as the sheer volume of wind turbines increases, so too does the incidence of mechanical faults. The industry is experiencing a worrying spike in accidents where these structures buckle and collapse, often without warning.
