Strong Wind Topples a Wind Turbine in Japan (digitaltrends.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Strong gusts brought by Typhoon Cimaron on Friday, August 24, toppled a massive wind turbine in western Japan, local media reported. The 60-meter-tall turbine was located in a park on Awaji Island, 275 miles west of Tokyo, but was wrenched from its base in the early hours of Friday morning as the typhoon pummeled a large part of the Japanese archipelago. Fortunately no one was under the wind turbine when it came down, or indeed on it. Built in 2002, the turbine had been out of commission since May last year after being struck by lightning, according to the Japan Times. News footage showed how the turbine had been torn from its base by the strong winds, with its 20-meter-long blades badly damaged by the impact with the ground. It's not yet clear if the base had been weakened in some way prior to the typhoon.

Comments

Re:They're dangerous!

[HornWumpus]

Japan runs on Australian coal. Crappy, dirty, brown coal the Aussies can't otherwise give away. All the plants are on the east coast, so the smoke blows out to sea.

Re:Tiny base

[scdeimos]

I agree that the foundations seem too small, https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... I'm only guessing that after the turbine got struck by lightning last year the feathering control systems were offline as well, i.e.: the turbine blades didn't get feathered against the typhoon's winds.

Re:They're dangerous? Not so much

[v1]

Looking at the video, at first I saw the pad at the bottom of the tower and thought "Wow, it must have pulled that right off the foundation!"

Then as they panned around, I realized the pad WAS the foundation! Just dirt below it, not so much as a pylon or two. Just two big black cables, probably power and control, going into the dirt under the pad. The entire foundation for the giant turbine was just a (relatively) thin slab of concrete.

There weren't any guy wires either. Just a button of concrete at the bottom. As someone who puts up towers from time to time (amateur radio) I'm not t al surprised that this came down in high winds. That'd be obscenely negligent of me to put up a tower with so little stability. When we plant a tower, it gets a large (often square) block of concrete poured in, several yards if it's a big tower, and self-supporting (no guy wires) always requires more support. You're doing a lot more than just preventing it from sinking into the ground, it's got to provide lateral stability to keep it from moving in high winds. (cube is much better for this than slab) We don't expect anything short of a direct hit from a strong tornado should be able to take them down. And this hurricane was an EF-3 at best. Either drop in a more substantial block of concrete, or guy that baby down, or wind load is gonna take it down eventually.