The figure excludes fatalities in countries like China or India, where data is difficult to verify.
The complete statistics for Europe and the US will be revealed in “uåX˜äŠÊ˜·³Ç’s upcoming health and safety supplement, published in January.
Our research has revealed more fatalities in the industry than previously known, but at a plummeting rate per megawatt installed (see graphic below).
To put the wind industry’s fatality rate in context, the industry’s riskiness is on a par with construction and other electricity-generating industries.
As Taf Powell, Director of Emerging Energy Technologies at the UK government’s Health and Safety Executive puts it, the wind industry is ‘high hazard’ -- although not ‘major hazard’, as are oil & gas or the chemical sectors.
In October 2010, a wind power worker died in Colorado after he was pinned between a flatbed railroad car and a large forklift while helping load tower sections.
Three months earlier, in the North Sea, a diver asphyxiated while working 40 metres below on the transformer platform of the Bard Offshore 1 wind plant. His air supply failed.
In May 2010, a man was killed by a heavy chain during construction of the UK’s Greater Gabbard offshore wind plant.
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