A cyclist was killed by falling wind turbine blade in Japan. To my knowledge this is the first case of a passerby being killed by a wind turbine. The 81-year old man was cycling near the wind turbine on what appears is a paved bicycle path. Takashi Shishido was likely hit by a portion of a blade that broke off an Enercon E82 operating in the city of Akita, Iwate prefecture.
There’s a brief discussion on Reddit with machine translation of reporting by Yomiuri in Japanese. Renew Economy also has covered it. See Joshua Hill’s Man dies in Japan after blade falls from wind turbine.
Deaths Database or Table of Mortality in the Wind Industry
For more than 40 years I’ve tracked the number of people killed in the wind industry. This began in 1980 with the death of Timothy McCartney (29) in Montana while attempting to recycle a windcharger from the 1950s—the same work I was performing at the time so I had a personal stake in the circumstances that led to his death. Not long after McCartney’s death, Terry Mehrkam was killed on one of his own machines near San Diego. I knew Mehrkam personally.
Naturally, my records only account for the deaths that I am aware of and I am dependent on the wind industry sending me information “over the transom” or news accounts—mostly in English—in the trade and popular press. While I do occasionally come across accounts in languages other than English that I attempt to interpret, I rarely see accounts of deaths in Asia. And I no longer subscribe to industry publications that are behind paywalls. My data, as a consequence, is by its nature incomplete.
According to my records 16 members of the public have been killed by wind energy in some manner. This represents 13% of those who have died since 1980. Three of those were pilots. One child has died and one person died in a prank. There have been two suicides, including one this spring in Wyoming. The oldest person to die around wind energy was an 85-year old male who died of a heart attack after climbing to the nacelle of wind turbine in Germany. Four women have died, including one German parachutist who died on her first solo jump in 2000.
In the interest of increasing work safety, my records are available upon request by anyone in the wind industry.
