Wind turbine maker to pay settlement after blade broke apart and washed up on Nantucket beaches
Fiberglass fragments of the blade began washing ashore last summer during the peak of tourist season after pieces of the wind turbine at the Vineyard Wind project began falling into the Atlantic Ocean in July 2024.
GE Vernova, which agreed to the settlement, blamed a manufacturing problem at one of its factories in Canada and said there was no indication of a design flaw. It reinspected all blades made at the factory and removed other blades made there from the Vineyard Wind location.
Crews in boats and on beaches, along with volunteers, collected truckloads of debris. The company said the debris was nontoxic fiberglass fragments and that the pieces were one square foot or smaller.
The settlement calls for establishing a fund along with a process to evaluate claims from businesses and distribute payments, Nantucket officials said.
The development's massive wind turbines with blades more than 328 feet (100 meters) long began sending electricity to the grid at the beginning of 2024.
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'I always said, the first time I got back on my feet, the Pritzkers would be the first people I'd go after,' he told The Chicago Tribune in 1993. (Mr. Trump later sold his interest in the hotel.) As Mr. Trump attacks Harvard, alumni, faculty and donors have suggested that convincing taxpayers of Harvard's importance in American society has never been more urgent. But some complain that Ms. Pritzker has stayed out of the public eye. One alumnus who attended a dinner with her at the Harvard Club in New York remembers that she let Dr. Garber do all the talking and said little beyond hello, goodbye and thank you. In April, when the Trump administration issued a series of demands of Harvard, including exercising some control over hiring, teaching and admissions, it was Dr. Garber who signed a public letter saying that Harvard would fight. 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Dr. Furman, the economics professor, said she was acting appropriately in her role. 'You hear from the C.E.O., you don't hear from the chairman,' Dr. Furman said. As head of the board, he added, 'you're not supposed to be the face, but you're supposed to be a very, very key person in shaping the decision.' Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist who has been sharply critical of the Trump administration and urged Harvard to fight back, said Harvard's leadership was perceived by many faculty members to be more attentive to donors and outside interests than to faculty and students. Still, he said, 'I don't think the federal government should be using its leverage to force out the leadership of a private university. That's authoritarianism.' Supporters say she brings her considerable business knowledge to the table, noting she rose to the top in male-dominated industries. Ms. Pritzker, who graduated from Harvard in 1981, is now the head of PSP Partners, a private investment firm, and she is worth $4.1 billion. Harvard's corporation is stuffed with eminent figures from Big Law, big business and elite academia. Perhaps not accidentally, however, the corporation's politics have shifted somewhat. This year, Kannon Shanmugam, who clerked for Antonin Scalia, the conservative Supreme Court justice, replaced Ted Wells, a lawyer and Democratic Party donor. So far the shift has not seemed to help Harvard's case. In recent days, the Trump administration has only escalated its attacks on the school. The fight with the Trump administration has convinced some people at Harvard that its governance model might need radical change. 'It might not be enough for Penny Pritzker to leave Harvard,' said Kit Parker, a bioengineering and applied physics professor on Harvard's Council on Academic Freedom, a group dedicated to supporting diverse points of view. 'It might need to be something much bigger,' he said. He added, 'It's hard to hold any one person responsible for what has happened at Harvard over the last 10 years.' Changing the board, he said, 'might be the one thing they can agree on without anyone losing face.' Kirsten Noyes, Susan C. Beachy and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. Michael C. Bender and Stephanie Saul contributed reporting.
