At about half past five on an August morning, a tractor trailer came up Route 1 in coastal Maine carrying one turbine blade.<\/p>\n
The blade was 240 feet long<\/strong>, which is most of the way to the length of a football field and a half.<\/p>\n Ahead of it was a railroad trestle crossing the highway, and the underside of that trestle is not level<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The truck was not far enough into the left lane, the blade caught the low side, and both units went over<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Nobody was hurt. What happened next is the part that is hard to picture from a photograph.<\/p>\n Because that truck was not a one off delivery. It was one run in a convoy program that had been going for weeks.<\/p>\n A wind project in Washington County needed 30 turbines<\/strong>, with towers standing 410 feet and blades running about 246 feet each.<\/p>\n Every piece came in by ship to a port terminal at Searsport, then went the last 70 miles by road.<\/p>\n The convoys left at 5 in the morning, ran five days a week<\/strong> from late June into October, and took roughly three hours to cover that stretch.<\/p>\n State police escorted each one, and the route threaded through four coastal towns<\/strong> with a detour off the highway near Ellsworth.<\/p>\n Residents along the route had been told to expect inconvenience. Nobody had promised there would be none.<\/p>\n And to see why the lane position mattered so much, you have to look at the shape of the obstacle.<\/p>\n An old rail trestle is not a flat ceiling. One side sits lower than the other, so the usable clearance changes across the road<\/strong>.<\/p>\n A driver hauling something oversized does not aim for the middle. He aims for the corner where the steel is highest.<\/p>\n The load makes that harder than it sounds, because a blade of that size overhangs far behind the trailer and swings wide<\/strong> on a curve.<\/p>\n Rigs built for this have a rear section that steers independently, worked by a second operator riding at the back.<\/p>\n So the whole vehicle is aimed twice<\/strong>, at the front and at the tail, and the two have to agree.<\/p>\n Then the margin ran out, and the report on it is short and unforgiving.<\/p>\n The driver did not position the vehicle far enough into the left lane to clear the lower side<\/strong> of the trestle.<\/p>\n The blade struck steel, the load stopped dead, and the momentum carried the tractor and the trailer over together.<\/p>\n Damage to the bridge itself was described as mild<\/strong>, which says something about what a rail trestle is built out of.<\/p>\n Four agencies turned out, from the state transportation department and the county sheriff to the fire department and the environmental agency.<\/p>\n The environmental crew was there for the obvious reason. A tipped tractor unit carries fuel and hydraulic oil<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Which brings the story to the sentence that made it national news.<\/p>\n Turning the vehicle around was not feasible<\/strong>, officials said, because of the length of the blade.<\/p>\n There is no intersection wide enough, no shoulder deep enough and no room at all<\/strong> to swing 240 feet of fiberglass through a coastal town.<\/p>\n So Route 1 stayed shut for close to 12 hours<\/strong> while crews worked out how to move an object that could only go in one direction, as the local paper<\/a> reported.<\/p>\n The answer was to bring in a second trailer overnight and transfer the blade onto it, as the trade press<\/a> covered.<\/p>\n Anyone who has watched a blade convoy<\/a> inch through a town knows that transfer is not a quick job, any more than the assembly of an offshore project<\/a> is.<\/p>\n And here is the detail that makes the whole thing worth telling.<\/p>\n The blade did not continue to the wind farm. It went back to Searsport<\/strong>, reaching the terminal at seven the next morning.<\/p>\n It had been about 66 miles from where it was going, and it ended the weekend roughly where it started that Friday.<\/p>\n Route 1 opened again, apart from another ten minute closure the next morning to let the second truck through with its load.<\/p>\n The project itself was finished on schedule, and those 30 turbines run at a combined 126 megawatts<\/strong> today.<\/p>\n None of which changes the plain lesson underneath. The hard part of building a wind farm is rarely the wind<\/strong>.<\/p>\n It is getting an object the length of a city block past a bridge somebody put up a century ago, on a road nobody widened since.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At about half past five on an August morning, a tractor trailer came up Route 1 in coastal Maine carrying one turbine blade. The blade was 240 feet long, which is most of the way to the length of a football field and a half. Ahead of it was a railroad trestle crossing the highway, and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":31173,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"turbine","rank_math_title":"","rank_math_description":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mobility"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What was moving through those towns<\/h2>\n
How a blade fits under a bridge<\/h2>\n
What went wrong that morning<\/h2>\n
Why they could not simply back it out<\/h2>\n
The blade went home<\/h2>\n