Iowa farmer regrets signing wind turbine lease after both turbines on her land burned to the ground

A couple of hours before the final BOS vote on the WECS on Wednesday, May 29, we received an email from a concerned lady in Iowa who has … well, had two wind turbines on their farm and asked us to share their story. One turbine is still there, but it’s a non-functional burned out husk as of May 13. The other one also burned a year ago. Her name and exact location are being withheld because more than a year later, they are still trying to resolve their problems with the wind energy company that put the turbines there.

On March 25, 2023 the first of their turbines was struck by lightning and burned. The second turbine burned on May 13, of this year. The wind energy company told her that one got hit by lightning too. But there was actually no lightning in the area at the time. When she asked about lightning and fire suppression systems? They told her that it’s cheaper to clean them up after they burn than it is to maintain the lightning protection and fire suppression systems. You’ll see why later in this article when you discover what they actually did to “clean” up the mess they left behind. The company has removed the first turbine but has not cleaned up any of the debris. It is now completely worked into the ground. Because it was windy and the wind changed direction the next day, the second turbine spread debris over at least 300 acres, which included 3 neighboring farms. They now have a cornfield that is growing fast and full of wind turbine fiberglass. They bale corn stalks to feed their cows. She didn’t know what they would have done if this had happened in October as they would not have been able to feed those cows. As it is, they can’t graze them on land that is heavily contaminated with fiberglass. Their volunteer fire department could do nothing to put out the fire on the turbines. Rural fire departments never can because of the difficulty of trying to fight a fire that is a combined material fire, chemical fire, and possibly electrical fire that is burning hundreds of feet in the air. Had it been during the drought, the field would have burned.

The wind company contracted with a clean-up crew to fix all of this. She managed to get the contract. It was three people with three shop vacs to clean for three days. Yes, you read that right. Three people, three shop vacs, three days, to clean up 300 acres of land. You can’t make this stuff up. This is Monty Python material. Or Spaceballs material where they are told to comb the desert and they are out there using literal combs to comb the desert. It would be downright comical if it weren’t so serious. Is it any wonder it is cheaper to “clean them up” after they burn than it is to maintain fire suppression and lightning protection systems so they don’t burn in the first place? She and her family are now picking up the debris by themselves. An instant shower is necessary to rid their bodies of the fiberglass they have handled and dug out of the dirt. Some studies have suggested that small fiberglass particles can lodge deep in the lungs and cause health problems years or even decades later. A gigantic crane has been sitting on their property for a year but has done nothing. Their soil is compacted and their drainage tiles are ruined. The erosion from the fields where cover crops could not be planted because it would hide the fiberglass is terrible. And the rain is washing the contamination into other fields.

She also said the turbines have had one problem after another. Even the technicians complained about having to continually work on them. One of the biggest problems was the constant leaking of oil into the fields. Oil, as you probably know, is insoluble in water, so rain will not the dilute the oil. It will just keep getting pushed farther and farther into the ground until it eventually ends up in the aquifer, where it will contaminate rural wells with industrial machine oil. As a side note, I used to work on the ground crew at a regional airport. One of my duties was refueling large passenger aircraft up to, and including Boeing 737s and Air Force C-130 transports. If we spilled more than a few gallons of jet fuel (which is similar to kerosene and basically a type of fuel oil), we had to call in a hazmat cleanup team immediately. But it seems wind turbine companies are subject to no such regulations if one of their turbines suffers a catastrophic failure and spills dozens of gallons of industrial machine oil into the soil.

The lady who contacted us was so frustrated that she called the farmer in New York who had the same problem to see if there was any solution (you can read that article here). He said he was still waiting on NextEra after a year and a half.

Two wind turbine fires on the same farm in less than a year suggests what has been reported for years now: Wind turbine fires are far more common than we know because there is no mandatory requirement that they be reported. As this incident shows, when fires do occur, they do a lot of damage over a wide area. That’s why it’s so important that we have a strong WECs to protect landowners and all rural residents from the damage they can do. Not only to agricultural land, but the environment in general. Indeed, even to the very water we drink.