• Wednesday-What'sUP June 2 - 04:24 pm

Lynn Virtanen was in the St. Ignace/Mackinac Bridge area recently and captured the passage of the BBC Mississippi cargo vessel on its way to Menominee with a load of what looks like large pipe of some sort. A ship like this one, stands out just a bit, since we're more accustomed to seeing the freighters that carry their cargo in the holds, such as ore, coal, salt, and the likes. According to the information I could find about the Mississippi, she was built in 2006/2007 (both years were listed), flies the Antiqua/Barbuda flag and travels not only the Great Lakes, but also the North Atlantic Ocean to overseas ports. For a young ship, it sure looks like she gets around! :->

The vessel has a cargo of Wind Turbine Towers.

Very interesting!

Any idea where they are headed, PJgrill?

I believe for south central Wisconsin.

I've seen entries on the Duluth Shipping News website about boatloads of turbine parts arriving there. No idea if that's where this ship may have been going.

I wonder where it would have picked these towers up from.

How come the bridge cam is stuck on May 23???

Greetings:

Unfortunately there is no way of knowing what, if any, ecological disaster is carried in "her" bilge tanks.

JT

I think they are still going to Iowa. At least the first ones did. Dick Lund has a great web site and pictures and he tells about them. Goggle his name. I would give you the address, but I am at work and that is blocked. Check this out. They are put on trucks and shipped out of Menominee. They are huge.

Iowa would make sense as a logical destination for the wind turbine cargo. We just came back from a trip all across Iowa, into Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana and then back thru North Dakota. Iowa and North Dakota have lotsa wind farms!

We saw quite a few wind turbines crossing southwest Minnesota and South Dakota on I-90. There is a ridge there created by retreating glaciers that is great for wind generation. We saw 106 car coal trains in and aound Wyoming/Montana (a cousin-in-law retired from the RR in Billings, Montana and said that number is the usual coal train.)
Following is a picture of a vehicle ferry taken from the deck of the ferry we were aboard, on the route from Vancouver to Victoria, BC coming through the narrows.

When in Menominee a couple years ago, my brother and I saw a freighter coming into the Menominee/Marinette harbor with a load of the turbine towers. We had hoped to get to the Minnekaunne (sp?) draw bridge in time to watch the freighter pass through, but missed it. A day later we saw the towers stacked in graduated piles on shore. They are ENORMOUS!!! I did not see any wind turbine towers on my way north. I wonder if they ended up in Wisconsin. Are there any in the UP? I recall "y'ars ago" there was one in Champion.

I think we should put wind turbines on the top of Quincy Hill where
mine rock houses used to stand.

Didn't our exalted leaders tell us that all these green energy initiatives would create U.S. jobs? I don't think this ship is hauling towers from Buffalo. Most likely they are coming from Europe. At least that is slightly better than China. One news source recently reported that for every "wind" job created here there are 1000 created in China. And, no, the source was one of the networks, not the far right ravers. Green energy is good, U.S. sourced green energy is what we should be striving for. Gotta love our politicians, vote them an early retirement in November!
We have lots of towers here on the prairie, they are big (400') and they are owned by European corporations. Each farm keeps about 10 permanent employees once they are up and running.

A lot of the wind turbine parts (blades, towers, etc...) come into the Port of Houston awaiting transport to other parts of the country. I get to see them up close and personel almost everyday when doing inspections. Most of the large generators are built in Germany (Enercon) and Denmark (Vestas); very few are built in China or even Asia for that matter.

There are a lot of them installed in and around Big Spring, Texas out on the W. Texas Plains where the wind almost never stops blowing. Yes, those things are huge when you see them on the ground, and equally impressive when built.

There's also a wind farm near the tip of Michigan's thumb, outside a small town called Pigeon. According to the town's website there are 32 towers. I don't recall offhand who owns them, but it wasn't the power company. I want to say it was GM or Dow or some other industrial giant, but I just can't remember for sure.
http://www.pigeonmichigan.com/node/33

I believe most of the towers are built in Spain. Europe has the edge on wind energy.

Living in the Cedar Rapids Iowa area I see a lot of these turbines being shipped thru on I-380. At first I thought they were airlane wings, they are huge. North of here,in Charles City, Iowa has a lot of them growing out of the fields.

There is a plant in Manitowoc, Wisconsin which manufactures wind turbines. There are large wind farms in that area of Wisconsin as well

Hi
On a much smaller scale, at our vacation home outside Cheboygan, somebody down the beach from us has a windmill on the shore of Lake Huron. Seems like a nice alternative to the electric company. It's silver in color, and not visually jarring. There are a half dozen of these small ones in the new marina in Mackinaw City, too.

I know this is off the 'subject' of the cam notes but, we went to the Ruth Ann Miller burial site and I could not bieleve the stuff that was being stored, for lack of a better word, inside the locked fence of her and her mothers' final resting place. There was a plaque, if you will, telling her (Ruth) story inside the locked fence with bullet holes in it. It was standing where everybody can see it. There were also cinder blocks and a blue plastic container with something on top of it as if the lid was being held down. All kinds of stuff that I would not want around my loved ones final resting place.

I spelled believe wrong in my posting.

Interesting note - while the towers & turbine parts are largely manufactured elsewhere, a decent number of blades are actually made in Minnesota... which means that the ships coming into Duluth carrying the tower and turbine parts often depart with their decks & holds full of blades! It's pretty neat.

Don't recall if it was last year or the year before, but the Murphy Oil dock in Duluth/Superior filled its single largest order ever when filling the tanks of a boat that had a deck-full of windmill blades... the captain was concerned that the lack of weight in his hold and tanks would spell trouble if he got too much wind across his decks, and those blades started doing their job on the open seas.

Mel, then the crew would all have to put some rocks in their pockets, like I have to on a windy day (ha! I wish).

How cool would that be to try and live OFF the grid, part of the time anyway.

i have a friend in minnesota that is 65% OFF the grid just using solar.
he has a sunroom that faces south...gets very hot even in winter. he has ducts with fans that pull that heat out and into the main house. Also panels on roof and a 12foot satellite antenna on his garage that has a tracking device to keep it pointed at the sun. Genrates a lot of heat.

there are 2 fairly good size wind turbine farms near Fond du lac Wisconsin. the Manitowoc area voted down having wind turbines, so there are none there, other than a small one at Lakeshore Tech College in Cleveland, which has a training program for wind turbine repair/technology. You yoopers should try to go there for school and pick up an up and coming trade.