Nantucket residents outraged over broken wind turbine: ‘It’s dangerous’

HYANNIS, Mass. — People on Nantucket are outraged as debris and fiberglass from a broken wind turbine continue to wash up on the island’s beaches.

Amy Di Sibio, a board member for ACK for Whales, has been against the construction of this offshore wind farm since the beginning.

“The whale strandings and whale deaths have correlated pretty much on target with when the offshore wind work started and it continues, and now we have this epic disaster,” said Di Sibio.

The disaster started last weekend when a blade broke off a wind turbine run by Vineyard Wind.

“The focus we have is the safety around it, so I want to emphasize I said it before there’s a 500 meter safety zone around it,” said Klaus Moeller, CEO of Vineyard Wind, while addressing Nantucket town leaders at a Select Board meeting Wednesday.

As of Thursday morning, Vineyard Wind says another significant portion of the blade detached, sending even more debris into the ocean.

The U.S. Coast Guard says they saw a piece of debris about 300 feet long, which is as big as a football field.

“Something like this is highly unusual and rare and when something like this happens, we do this root cause analysis to see what kind of adjustments may need to be made,” said Roger Martella, chief sustainability officer for General Electric Vernova, the manufacturer of the turbine. “This is not an acceptable outcome and not something we ever want to see repeated again.”

GE Vernova says the debris is non-toxic.

“Are you kidding? It’s all toxic, you know, you can’t ingest that stuff, it’s sharp it’s dangerous,” said Di Sibio.

Beaches on Nantucket were forced to close this week during the island’s busiest days of the year as the debris poses a risk to swimmers and boaters.

Di Sibio is also worried about the environmental impact.

“There’s zillions of little teeny particles that will now be part of the food supply out there, I mean it’s absolutely outrageous,” said Di Sibio. “So the fact that this happened Saturday, no one knew about it until Monday is a disgrace.”

“I think this is important for us as a community to understand the risk of these wind farms,” said Brooke Mohr, chair of Nantucket’s Select Board, during Wednesday’s meeting.

Nantucket town leaders are now questioning whether an offshore wind farm is even safe to continue building, while folks like Di Sibio hope town leaders put a stop to the project.

“Better to have this now than when it’s too late,” said Di Sibio.

Vineyard Wind says they have stopped operating the wind farm while they continue to investigate how this blade broke, and they have deployed teams to Nantucket to gather any more debris that’s expected to wash ashore Thursday night and Friday morning.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.

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