Given there are literally millions of trucks on the road at any given moment, crashes are not exactly rare. However, few of these crashes involve shipping containers that end up neatly impaled on long, rigid wind turbine blades. And yet – that’s precisely what happened on China’s Hebei Expressway on Friday.
The secret to wind turbines is that the bigger you build them, the more electricity they make. Of course, to build big wind turbines, you have to find a way to transport their massive blades across the road network. This is typically achieved by placing the blades on a specially-designed trailer, often with the tip of the blade overhanging at the rear.
It’s this method of transport that caused all the trouble in a shocking incident in China last week. As reported by MSN China, a container truck was involved in a perilous crash with a turbine blade transporter, with the driver narrowly avoiding a fatal accident.
惊悚！货车撞上风力发电机近百米米大叶片！网友：这下保险公司赔大了！ pic.twitter.com/M1xexktBr0
— 希望之聲 – 中國時局 (@SoundOfHope_SOH) March 14, 2025
The precise cause of the crash is unclear. In a video posted to Twitter (above), we only see the aftermath. A semi-truck can be seen impaled upon a long wind turbine blade, which was itself being hauled by another prime mover further down the road. The turbine blade neatly pierced the shipping container on the back of the truck, leaving it sitting above the road surface, somewhat askew.
Given the state of the crash scene, it appears the driver of the semi-truck was approaching the turbine blade hauler at some speed. It’s unclear how fast the blade-hauling truck was traveling when it was hit. Regardless, the speed differential must have been high to enable the blade to so completely pierce the steel shipping container on the truck behind.
The truck apparently swerved at the last moment, so the wind turbine blade only pierced the shipping container on the trailer, while leaving the cabin intact. This thankfully allowed the driver to survive the incident, with MSN China reporting that there were no casualties.
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Another view of the scene.
As seen in the image above, taken on I-35 in Texas, it is not uncommon to transport wind turbine blades by letting them hang over the end of a long trailer or specialized hauling device. With some blades reaching up to 350 feet long on modern wind turbines, it’s often a practical necessity.
However, this creates somewhat of a risk for any vehicle that might hit the turbine from behind. While a small car or SUV could probably pass underneath, a taller truck would place the driver’s cabin right in the danger zone. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that the thin tip of a turbine blade is not exactly easy to see when it’s being hauled in this fashion.
In this case, we can see from the crash video that the turbine blade was overhanging the rear of the trailer by a great degree. This would have made it somewhat more difficult for following traffic to spot the end of the blade. Still, there is a large visible red flash on at least part of the turbine blade, though it may have been on the upper surface which was less visible to those driving behind.
Ultimately, it’s one of the stranger crashes we’ve seen of late, and thankfully one without a tragic outcome. It’s a good lesson not to get distracted when driving—particularly if there are oversized vehicles with odd loads on the highway ahead of you.
Image credits: Instagram screenshots via @mychinatrip, Twitter screenshot via @SoundOfHope_SOH, Alexi Kostibas CC BY-SA 2.0 (Wiki Commons)
Top graphic images: SoundOfHope_SOH; depositphotos.com
BAN WIND TURBINES!!!
Driving back from Colorado Spring to DIA (Denver International Airport) I passed a train with a bunch wind turbine of blades (probably not quite that long) and the sight was mesmerizing.
Visually more striking than Boeing fuselages being transported on over-size vehicles.
I’m pretty sure I have seen videos of Airbus 380 fuselages being trucked from one factory to the final assembly site. As I recall, it was probably a big inconvenience to the locals.
Flying a little Cessna 150 out of Renton, WA, sometimes I’d have to wait 20+ minutes when a newly minted 737 from the Boeing factory there, was going to take off on a checkout flight. No passengers or freight, and just enough to fuel to do its thing, they took off like a bat out of hell. Those 737 pilots probably had a lot of fun. I’d guess 4000+ fpm up judging by their speed and trajectory.
One of PACCAR’s factories, the makers or Kenworths and Peterbilts, is probably less than a mile away.
Manufacturing, on a large scale, is fascinating.