What is the full lifecycle plan for the turbine? Is this special airplane to land in the same dirt field that's now a housing development? Are they only pairing these megaturbines with airfields? How exactly will a new blade arrive on-site in 2050?
I expect these guys had 'trees' on their risk register, and have suggested to the site owners to purchase a chainsaw / rent an excavator for a day or two.
Either way, I'm pretty confident on a project the size we're talking here - somewhere upwards of USD $5 billion? - they've probably spent a couple of afternoons pondering logistics.
A while back, we had a whiteout on the highway by the local airport. Someone wrote in to propose - in apparent seriousness - planting trees at the end of the runway to ensure it wouldn't happen again.
They put them in farm fields, you just rent the whole field for the year from the farmer, land the planes, and next year it is framed again. (the farmer will likely be allowed to plant hay in the field and work with you to cut that)
Citation needed. I toured a wind farm a few months ago, and they were barely audible at ground level.
There is a bunch of very energetic windturbine collapses captured on video. In each case someone standing at the wrong spot could have been crushed by falling debris. (Altough i also must admit an overspeeding turbine looks so plainly obviously deadly that anyone with a healthy dose of self preservation would evacuate the danger zone. At least in the cases where we have video of the collapse. There might be a bias to that of course, because nobody would think of filming an unexpected sudden collapse.)
A particularly well documented one is the Hornslet wind turbine collapse.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornslet_wind-turbine_collap...
https://youtu.be/jvHBUSSAzyw?si=NDpN-ZgXqPrTavvk
There was this one in Oklahoma: https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-turbine-collapses-on-calm-d...
This i believe happened in Italy: https://youtu.be/af9Mm5nkNAQ?si=wajCXTCpN19z9okJ
Just a few days ago there was a collapse in Perth: https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/5330408/blades-perth-av...
There is also a widely shared very dramatic video with horses running away from the turbine just before it collapses. But because i can’t figure out where it happened, and if it even happened, i’m reluctant to include here.
I wonder how big is the danger zone. The blades seem to come off all at the same time, some to the sides, some up/down. There's quite a lot of kinetic energy there...
That seems like the logical solution. Given the complexities involved overall, a step for "don't build over this patch of dirt" seems relatively achievable.