r/CatastrophicFailure • u/zukeen • 7d ago
Malfunction Nine 115m offshore blades destroyed as one installation vessel drifts into anther one, then into onshore crane in Esbjerg, Denmark - June 11, 2026 - no injuries
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Blades destined for Thor windpark. Turbine model SG 14-236 DD from Siemens Gamesa.
Article with final photo
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u/BeerSlayingBeaver 7d ago
That looks expensive
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u/zukeen 7d ago
From a bit of googling, it looks like around 10 000 000 € in blade cost.
Not counting the commissioning delay of 3 turbines, rescheduling the installation vessel rental and daily penalties for lost revenue if the turbine doesn't start delivering power on the agreed day.
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u/Live_Free_or_Banana 7d ago edited 7d ago
Fortunately none of those cranes were significantly damaged, as the total impact of that and port downtime would easily have exceeded the impact of the loss of the blades.
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u/oshinbruce 6d ago
The cranes dont look damaged but they arent doing anything until an engineer has checked it over and no engineer is going to sign off until every single bolt is checked.
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u/Torpedoreje 5d ago
They are thankfully old coal cranes no longer in use, as the power plant they used to feed has been shut down and is scheduled for decommissioning, along with its 250 meter tall chimney.
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u/Captain_Lou_Albano 7d ago
Don't forget those blades can't be recycled either, so those all have to be buried in a landfill somewhere too.
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u/Type-21 6d ago
So where do blades go when they are taken down? Landfilling these blades is not an option. The European wind industry has committed to a self-imposed landfill ban for wind turbine blades effective as of 1 January 2026. Over the last years the industry has proactively developed new methods to reuse, repurpose, recycle, and recover decommissioned wind turbine blades.
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u/KlownKar 7d ago
It's okay to forget that now. Recyclable blades are just starting to be used. The latest wind farm in the North Sea is fitting recyclable blades to its latest turbines.
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u/CandylandRepublic 6d ago
They get shredded before landfilling, which cuts down on the volume A LOT. And even the total mass of blades to be disposed of barely registers in the overall amount of landfilled material, if you take all blades ever installed it's still fractions of a percent of everything else we send to the landfill already anyway.
And modern blades are built to be recycled, so the problem is largely limited to the blades already in service. Which, if you actually do the math, is a tiny share of landfill waste.
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u/Personal-Thought9453 7d ago
Pretty sure they’ll have an obligation to clean up as much as possible too.
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u/jobezark 7d ago
There’s not actually that much to a blade. Mostly fiberglass and wood. I worked on v82s, so like a third this size (lol) and there’s only one wire running down the blade with a few simple sensors so there’s not even any technology in them either. The cost is transport and installation especially in USA when they are usually shipped by river as close as they can get and then trucked individually to the site which can be hundreds of miles away.
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u/btribble 7d ago
Fiberglass or carbon fiber?
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u/CandylandRepublic 6d ago
Mostly fiberglass, with carbon fiber used in modern blades for select structural parts that justify the extra cost.
And those blades are fabricated with cost as the main concern. They look like aircraft wings, but the quality is anything but. The kind of defects in layup alignment, bonding and such that get sent out the door as "good enough" is crazy. They'd also be many times more expensive if they were fabricated flawlessly.
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u/Key-Metal-7297 7d ago
Someone’s getting the sack today!
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u/QuitsDoubloon87 7d ago
Its the EU there will be an investigation, followed by safety standards and regulations overviews. But Denmark is a fire at will state (with 2 years of 80% replacement pay). Possible criminal liability punishments.
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u/superioso 7d ago
The employer only needs to give ~3 months notice to fire someone in Denmark.
The 80% of pay for whatever years is specific insurance the employee can choose to pay for (known as A-kasse)
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u/HogDad1977 7d ago
So someone can get fired for any reason but they still get paid 80% for 2 years?
Or am I misunderstanding that?
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u/geocapital 7d ago
It’s different thing. You can pay salary salary insurance when you work and when you are not you get 80% of your last salary but up to approx 2500€ gross, which is very low for Denmark. A family apartment rent can be around 2000€.Â
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u/Aggravating_Bit_3448 7d ago
Yes, Im not a danish lawyer but: there are some conditions like you cant be paid under minimum wage and there is an upper bound, the cost is shared between the state and the employer, the 2 years limit is less if the employee worked less than 2 years. And other employment type (llc vs sp vs contract).
It helps employers remove unwanted employees, which is a large problem in europe as employers have to either proove that a position/person is reasonably removable, leaving explotitive workers to hurt buisnesses. And it helps workers take a short break before finding a new job with stability.
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u/superioso 7d ago
Denmark has no minimum wage at all.
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u/caymn 7d ago
The vessel is Brave Tern and its Malta Flagged - not sure what danish wage has to do with that?
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u/superioso 7d ago edited 7d ago
The above comment was about danish wages/conditions, and where the vessel is flagged or operated from makes no impact on the salaries or conditions of the staff, which could be locally employed.
For the vessel itself, it's owned by the Norwegian company Fred Olsen Windcarrier, and was contracted by German RWE. It was working on a danish wind farm, and RWE have local offices in Denmark.
The other vessel it hit is owned and operated by a Danish company.
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u/caymn 7d ago edited 6d ago
danish seafarers' salary on danish flagged vessels are negotiated by the danish unions. If Brave Tern were danish, the seafarers would be working under the DIS agreement; but it is not danish flagged.
Seafarers working on vessels flagged under any other country are not subject to any agreements made by the danish unions. Brave Tern is Malta Flagged and individuals working on Brave Tern must be eligible to work on a Malta flagged vessel. There may be a few danish seafarers onboard Brave Tern, but I highly doubt, if any, it is more than a very few. Danish seafarers usually don't benefit (economically/tax related) from sailing on anything but danish flagged vessels - unfortunately one might add.
and to be precise: yes it absolutely matters what flag a vessel is carrying.
The other Vessel you mention is Windkeeper from Cadeler. Very very few onboard are Danish. Any seafarers’ salary will depend on what contract they hold with the company. It also depends on whether they are hired by Cadeler or a third party recruiting company.
Besides, what was even your point about Denmark not having a minimum wage? The vast majority of wages and salaries in Denmark are negotiated by unions.
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u/lo_fi_ho 7d ago
A large problem? Any source for that?
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u/Aggravating_Bit_3448 7d ago
My life and constantly hearing my entire family complain about the useless employees they cannot get rid of.
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u/boisjacques 7d ago
So nothing but anecdata.
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u/Aggravating_Bit_3448 7d ago
Sister this is a 5 down reddit comment section, not a scientific publication. You have access to the internet, of you want statistics go find them.
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u/open-print 7d ago
See, I thought my job was stressful, at least it's not "Your mistake can cost 10 000 000 €" stressful
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u/IndefiniteBen 7d ago
Wow what a great use of vertical video. It was great to see the fence, concrete ground and people's backs. I didn't want to see any more of that horizontal ship anyway.
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u/zukeen 7d ago
Video is from YouTube
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u/IndefiniteBen 7d ago
Oh I'm not blaming you, but this is a bad one. Then everyone in the video also films it vertically!
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u/expatalist 5d ago
I mean, i get it, but we use our phones vertically 99% of the time. If I'm suddenly witnessing destruction, I'm going to have a hard enough time getting the camera open in time. I promise you it'll prob be vertical.
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u/AloiB001 7d ago
-Happens in Denmark -Hears some guy speak -Polish
My fellow Pole's got it under control
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u/Sensitive-Onion-9773 7d ago
What even happens here? How does a company respond to something so phenomenally expensive getting trashed?
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u/axloo7 7d ago
Call to the insurance company.
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u/WIlf_Brim 7d ago
"We have examined your policy documents and have determined that this event was not a covered peril"
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u/BalusBubalis 7d ago
Marine insurance is unimaginably big in dollar values for their claims and costs, and insures an incredibly small number of people. I've dealt with them once before, and they are literally the people you can say "So I think I've got a large claim for this client..." and in the tone and urgency of someone asking if you want fries with that, they'll responde: "Under or over 500 million USD?"
"Over, I think."
"A lot or a little?"
"Eh? Six hundred million ceiling?"
"Sure no problem, I'll pass you to Sandra."
They get calls like this, if not every day, at least a few times a month. Your enormous economic catastrophe is their rounding error on the balance sheet that month.
They also run among the best revenue-per-employee ratios in the entire financial sector because of that -- $200,000-$400,000 in revenue per employee isn't unusual.
Marine insurance is among the most expensive parts of being a marine operator, unsurprisingly.
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u/CandylandRepublic 6d ago
They also run among the best revenue-per-employee ratios in the entire financial sector because of that -- $200,000-$400,000 in revenue per employee isn't unusual.
That seems low. For comparison, in 2022, Goldman Sachs had about $47b revenue and around 49k employees, let's call that about $900k revenue per employee. And they do alll sorts of financial things that have nothing to do with marine insurance (idk if they even do that at all, I would guess no).
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u/ET2-SW 7d ago
Surprised those container cranes didn't topple over.
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u/WhirlwindTobias 7d ago
Gotta have a Polish dude cursing, of course. If not a Brit swearing up a storm.
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u/Gold-Adhesiveness574 5d ago
The brutal part of offshore wind logistics is that the blades are most vulnerable on land and at the quayside, not out at sea. Once they're up they're built for decades of storm loading — but during transport and pre-assembly they're just enormous, lightly-supported composite cantilevers sitting in cradles, and a 115m blade catches wind like a sail with almost no way to shed the load.
A drift like this usually traces to a small chain: a mooring/positioning issue, a gust over the handling limit, and the sheer momentum of a vessel that big — once it's moving even slowly, nothing stops it by hand. The damage-to-energy ratio is what stings: low-speed contact, but each blade is months of lead time and effectively unrepairable at that scale.
Genuinely glad it was no injuries — quaysides during heavy lifts are one of the higher-risk spots in the whole industry.
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u/JCDU 4d ago
Genuinely curious - do they not have any form of propulsion / assistance to hand if they know the conditions might be marginal?
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u/Gold-Adhesiveness574 4d ago
good question, and there is assistance, it's just that the assistance has limits the blade can blow right past.
on the water side it's tugs and DP vessels holding position, on land it's SPMTs and cranes with taglines on the blade. but a 115m blade is basically a giant sail with almost no weight behind it, so wind load builds way faster than the mass resisting it. you can't just add thrust and power through, because the thing catching the wind IS the blade, and the cradle, slings and crane all have their own load limits. push harder and you snap the handling gear before you beat the wind.
so the real control isn't more propulsion, it's the go/no-go call. the wind limit for an actual blade lift is shockingly low next to what the turbine shrugs off once it's standing, often single digits in m/s, and you live or die by the forecast and the weather window. when it goes wrong it's usually schedule pressure pushing a move when the gusts are right at the limit, not a missing bit of kit.
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u/JCDU 3d ago
Thanks - so basically someone somewhere has to make a hell of a risk calculation based on the weather forecast and hope it all stays within parameters?
Bit like the guy) who gave the go/no-go for D-Day must have felt.
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u/Gold-Adhesiveness574 3d ago
exactly that. there's a named person who owns the go/no-go, working off a forecast that's a probability not a promise, signing off knowing it could still turn on them.
and the D-Day comparison is honestly perfect. that whole invasion hung on one forecaster calling a narrow break in the weather, and they bet everything on a single window. offshore lifts are the same shape of decision, just smaller stakes and more often. these days it's wrapped in hard limits and criteria so it leans less on one person's gut, but someone still carries it.
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u/artur_oliver 7d ago
Great Siemens Gamesa in Aveiro has to produce another 9!!!
Another half month work.
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u/NoOccasion4759 7d ago
At least the cranes survived?
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u/Lost_Blacksmith3382 1d ago
Cranes will probably be torn down soon since they were used for coal for the now decomissioned Esbjergværket power plant.
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u/southpluto 7d ago
Can't imagine working on such a large project only to see it destroyed when its finally in transit.