Fire: a wind turbine catches fire in the middle of the night in the Somme

Flames in the sky, dozens of meters high: it’s a rare and somewhat impressive sight. Around 11pm on Monday May 5, a wind turbine caught fire at Lafresguimont-Saint-Martin in the Somme region. The fire required the intervention of 27 firefighters, but not to extinguish the blaze, as well as the gendarmerie and Enedis teams. The latter cut off the power supply “to eliminate any risk”, as explained by the SDIS de la Somme.

“On this type of fire, we just set up a safety perimeter to prevent debris from injuring anyone, but we don’t go up, because we can’t access it”, explains the SDIS de la Somme. This is advice from the Ministry of the Interior.

There is in fact a very strict procedure for interventions in wind turbines. In the event of a fire at height, “any action at height or inside the mast is forbidden. Access to the wind turbine is strictly limited to saving human life. (…) Firefighting must be limited to preventing the spread of the fire to other targets”, reads the operational guide drawn up by the French Civil Protection and Crisis Management Directorate. The safety perimeter must be calculated according to the height of the mast, so that no one is endangered if it collapses. All that remains is to wait for the fire to extinguish itself.

The cause of the fire at Lafresguimont-Saint-Martin remains unknown for the moment, and an investigation is underway, but the wind turbine was completely destroyed and is now unusable. A similar incident had already occurred in March 2024 to the east of Amiens, but 80 kilometers separate the two locations.

France3/Actufr, May 6, 2025

via: sansnom