Mile 756.9

All day I've been driving through rolling hills, cow pastures, and farmland. The sky has been overcast, and very dark, and the radio has been issuing flash flood warnings, and checking with the weatherman to see if there is any “cloud rotation developing” every five minutes or so. I somehow managed to miss most of the storm, but it still made everything looks pretty miserable, and I just could not imagine how I was going to get some good pylon-shots in today.

Then, all of the sudden, there it was. I've already passed two other wind turbines so far, but both of them were significantly smaller and were planted in commercial districts. But THIS one. The other thing that immediately caught my eye was that there was an access road leading directly to the base, what looked like some sort of informational sinage, and NO fences or warning signs.

I took the next exit, and made my way through the back roads towards the turbine. Not only was there no warning/private property signs, but the service road was labeled, and had a few houses coming off of it.

When I climbed out of the car at the base of the turbine, three things surprised me all at once. First of all, it was REALLY windy. Second, that the turbine blades were howling horrifically and deflecting quite noticeably in the wind. And Third, I was right underneath 12 tons of bladed spinning awesomeness.

Call me a geek, which I am, but I got a huge adrenaline rush from this. Not from the trespassing (which I don't think I was), but just from being alone, in the middle of nowhere, close to a feat of engineering of such power, complexity, and lethal potential.

The signage I had spotted from the highway boasted about the technical specifications for the Turbine ( 900 kW, blade length of 85 feet and each blade weighing in 4 tons). Apparently this is one of two Turbines erected by a local energy co-op, and has been operating for 6 years.

I also did some back of the envelope math, and the blade tips would have only been traveling at 14 MPH, but it was still awe-inspiring.

Also, for those of you wondering why I was so fixated on wind-turbine related death...

Those pieces of steel you see floating gently to the ground like feathers? Yeah, those are chunks larger than 5 feet, some probably as long as 30 feet, and they aren't falling all that gently.