Updated Nov. 11
Visible off Route 25 before the Bourne Bridge on the way to the Island, a small onshore wind farm around a cranberry bog in Plymouth that has operated for almost a decade suffered a blade failure Friday afternoon.
There were no injuries, and there is no current danger to the public. No homes or occupied buildings were in the “immediate vicinity of the fall,” a press release from the Plymouth Fire Department said.
Plymouth Fire officials were contacted Friday just before 2 pm by a concerned neighbor who noticed that one of the three blades on a nearly 300-foot turbine near Head of the Bay Road was gone. Firefighters located the detached blade, between 75 and 100 feet long, several hundred feet away from the base of the turbine, in the cranberry bog.
“We were fortunate that this turbine is located out in the middle of the cranberry bogs, and not in a residential area,” Neil Foley, Plymouth Fire Department chief, said. “Thankfully, no one was hurt, and the turbine automatically shut itself down as designed.”
The incident comes more than a year after a blade broke off at the Vineyard Wind 1 offshore wind farm and littered debris, mostly on the Nantucket shoreline; the failure was blamed on a flaw at a blade facility, and manufacturer GE Vernova eventually paid the town of Nantucket $10.5 million for economic losses incurred.
The Plymouth blade was manufactured by a company that has ties to two offshore wind projects close to the Island.
A database on wind turbines by the U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Geological Survey, and American Clean Power Association reports that the turbines for the project were manufactured by Gamesa. Gamesa and Siemens Wind Power merged in April 2017 to become Siemens Gamesa, which manufactures and maintains onshore and offshore wind turbines.
Both South Fork Wind and Revolution Wind, two offshore wind projects built or under construction off the coast of the Island and developed by Ørsted, use turbines from Siemens Gamesa. The company didn’t respond for comment by deadline.
It’s still unclear what caused the blade failure in Plymouth. Siemens Gamesa, responsible for maintenance of the wind turbine, responded to the scene Friday, and is still in the process of inspections to determine the cause of the break. The turbines entered a “fail-safe mode” and shut down immediately after the blade detached, Plymouth fire officials said.
Foley added that the state Department of Environmental Protection and the town of Plymouth’s inspectional services department have both been notified about the incident.
“As we continue to investigate, MassDEP and inspectional services will now do their due diligence to ensure this incident is addressed appropriately, and the impacted area is cleaned up safely,” Foley said.
The turbine is one of four located on the property of Keith A. Mann, a third-generation cranberry grower and harvester, who provides cranberries to Ocean Spray. Mann leased the land to energy company Con Edison, which owned and operated the small-scale wind farm, for a development fee, a Bourne Enterprise article reported in 2016. But Con Ed sold its clean-energy businesses to RWE Renewables Americas in March 2023 to refocus efforts in New York, and no longer owns any wind turbines, Ariel Taub, a communications specialist for the company, said.
While RWE is the owner of the Future Generation Wind farm, Siemens Gamesa is the maintenance operator, according to Casey Kennedy, communications coordinator of Plymouth.
“We have started an exhaustive root-cause analysis of this incident with the equipment manufacturer and service partner,” Patricia Kakridas, spokesperson for RWE, said. The project, which includes three other turbines, was all shut down as a precaution.
“Once it is determined the site is safe, work will begin to remove the fallen blade. We are working closely with the community, the landowner, and local and state officials. The safety of our people, neighbors, and the communities where we operate is always our top priority,” Kakridas added.
The Plymouth turbine farm came online in 2016, and has a nominal output capacity of eight megawatts (two megawatts per turbine).
Editor’s note: Updated to include a comment from RWE spokesperson.
Here we go again — another warning shot we cannot ignore.
A Plymouth turbine just threw a blade nearly 100 feet long. No one was hurt only because it landed in a cranberry bog. That’s not “safety” — that’s luck. If this had happened near homes, a school, or a roadway, we could be talking about injuries or worse.
More troubling is the pattern. Nantucket spent months cleaning turbine debris after a Vineyard Wind 1 failure — serious enough to trigger a $10.5 million settlement. Now another blade from a manufacturer tied to South Fork Wind and Revolution Wind has failed. How many warnings do we need before pressing pause?
Onshore, a blade falls into a bog. Offshore, debris becomes a drifting hazard in dynamic ocean currents. It can travel for miles, threatening endangered whales, migratory fish, seabirds, fishing gear, ferries, and the fragile marine ecosystem that sustains Vineyard culture and economy. We still have no reliable containment or emergency-response system to protect marine life when turbines fail.
Yet Massachusetts continues sprinting ahead, stacking industrial turbines in prime fishing grounds and migration corridors — with no long-term safety track record at this scale.
Before further offshore expansion, we need accountability, independent oversight, and real risk assessment — not another “we’re investigating.”
How many people have been killed by wind power?
Oil extraction, transportation, consumption?
Coal mining?
Wind turbines are not located near homes.
Gas turbines blow up.
Like fiberglass boats, turbine blades sink.
Wind turbines present a hazard to ferries?
No one here is arguing that coal or oil are “safe.” Pointing to other dangerous industries doesn’t make repeated turbine failures acceptable — it just tells us we shouldn’t blindly gamble with this one either.
Your claim that turbines “aren’t near homes” is incorrect. Onshore turbines are routinely sited within regulated setbacks of occupied buildings — close enough that a nearly 100-foot blade failure near Plymouth could have caused injuries had it not happened to land in a cranberry bog. That was luck, not safety.
The idea that “blades sink” also doesn’t hold. The Vineyard Wind 1 failure scattered fiberglass debris across Nantucket beaches, required cleanup, and resulted in a $10.5 million settlement. If everything simply sank, residents wouldn’t have been picking pieces off the shoreline.
And yes, gas turbines can explode. That fact doesn’t excuse offshore wind failures — it reinforces the obvious: major energy infrastructure carries risk and requires serious oversight.
Offshore wind is being rushed ahead without proven containment, retrieval, or emergency-response capacity when blades detach and debris travels unpredictable ocean currents.
The recent failures — onshore and offshore — show we need accountability, engineering transparency, and real risk assessment before further expansion. “Other industries are dangerous too” is not a safety plan.
Safety is relative.
I have worked in the Gulf of America.
Seen the rough necks broken bodies.
$10.5 million settlement – How much did the clean up cost?
How much was picked up?
How many fiberglass boats were picked up.
“The recent failures — onshore and offshore”
Is the death rate per megawatt higher for wind than for oil?
Oil is dangerous, should it be shut down?
Is that a good plan?
I live nearby the turbines and luckily my neighborhood was able to stop a project in our neighborhood and by a elementary school in Bourne. These projects are shortsighted to say the least…
Do you feel lucky having more hydrocarbon emissions?
Oil and coal deliver products that help to keep us from becoming third world countries and freezing to death. Ask any of the women who are spending all day cooking a meal over a fire pit if they’d like to have the luxury of petroleum products. The wind industry is causing big problems with the environment, all for questionable results. Thankfully, the mask is coming off and more and more people are speaking out against this green new money grab.
The cost of the oil industry is all around us. We can cook with electricity. The money grab are the oil leases to the huge Fossil Fuel companies. The money that goes to cover the damage to the environment from these fuels will be with us for centuries. That turbine blade is already cleaned up.
We need turbines that don’t break.
We need solar on every roof.
We need politicians who are willing to spend money to put solar on every rooftop and stop the deadly nuclear energy game.
We need a society that recognizes how dangerous nuclear waste is, and the enormous costs of securing it for 100,000 years.
If each one of us was responsible for the costs (cancer deaths as well as buying an army to protect the waste for thousands of generations), maybe we wouldn’t knee-jerk react to a little visual disturbance on the horizon.
Please, we must embrace solar and wind energy.
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