Here we have two videos, found via The Register, of a wind turbine generator failing catastrophically in high winds in Denmark.

The wind turbine in the videos has apparently failed to ‘feather’ it’s blades and has subsequently got into an overspeed condition. Engineers had been sent out to attempt to stop the turbine but they had [wisely] retired to a safe distance when they realised that it would be too dangerous to work on the turbine. They did, however, leave their van underneath and it nearly gets flattened by the generator head.

There’s quite a bang just as the blades separate. I’d be interested to know whether it’s just the sound of the stress failure or if the blade tips actually went supersonic at the moment of failure.

The turbine was 60 meters (~200 feet) high and was located at Hornslet near Aarhus. The Danish Climate Minister has ordered an investigation into the failure of this turbine and another turbine earlier in the week.

Both videos show the same turbine failing.

If it ain’t broke, break it.

The BBC, in their never ending quest to be trendy have decided to change their homepage. They’ve developed something of the NASA syndrome* and gone for clicky/slidey widgets everywhere. They have also increased the width of the rendered page to approximately fit 1024 wide displays.

Now, each of the widgets on the page requires a pretty hefty chunk of processing power to render, my E6750 dual core desktop doesn’t notice but my Nokia N800 certainly does. Loading the BBC webpage on the internet tablet takes about 17-20 seconds while each widget unit is rendered. Once rendered, any state-change in a widget (a ‘reveal’ for example) takes a further 5-6 seconds.

To add insult to injury, the ‘New BBC Homepage’ is just a facade over the old site, click on any news item or department link (after slogging your way through the cripplingly slow main homepage on your mobile device) and you’ll be presented with the old webpages. The only other option is to use the ‘mobile/pdas’ link which is in itself, a content-crippled portal to the BBC site.

The TV licence in the UK now costs a staggering £135.50 a year for which you now get very little intelligent programming. I find that I watch about 20-30 minutes of television in an entire week, the only channel of any real factual value seems to be BBC parliament which is nothing more than a relay of proceedings.

I had enjoyed the BBC website and BBC News in particular but the inexorable decline of the journalistic standards has, over the years, diminished it’s value for me. The new homepage system has pretty much removed all remaining value by making the site at best uncomfortable to use and at worst inaccessible from the now common mobile devices.

As a British citizen, it is unfortunate that the BBC now fails to provide me with any useful service.

*At least on nasa.gov with the N800, the site fails over gracefully and allows you to quickly and easily reach the existing, still high quality factual content.

The British Geological Survey have pegged last night’s Earthquake as a 5.2 on the Richter scale (the USGS previously calculated a 4.7).

They calculate that the epicentre was focused at Market Rasen in Lincolnshire, half way between Lincoln and Grimsby.

• DATE : 27 February 2008
• ORIGIN TIME : 00:56 GMT
• LAT/LONG :53.42° North / 0.35° West
• GRID REF : 509.4 kmE / 392.7 kmN
• DEPTH : 5.0 km
• MAGNITUDE : 5.2 Richter Scale (ML)
• LOCALITY : Market Rasen, Lincolnshire

According to the BGS, this was the UK’s largest Earthquake for 24 years.

The epicentre is approximately 4 km north of Market Rasen and reports suggest that the
earthquake has been felt widely across England, with reports of damage to chimneys in
the epicentral area. Earthquakes of this size occur in the mainland UK roughly every 30
years, although are more common in offshore areas. This is the largest earthquake in the
UK since the magnitude 5.4 ML Lleyn Peninsula earthquake in 1984, which was widely
felt across England and Wales.

The Earthquake was widely felt and reported across much of the country but luckily, it seems, British structures are sturdy enough to survive a magnitude 5.2 earthquake without serious damage. There have been some reports of chimney stacks falling and the only known injury was caused by one such occurrence. A 19 year old student from Barnsley was pinned under a fallen stack and later taken to hospital for surgery on a broken pelvis.

Apparently, there was an aftershock in the vicinity of the main earthquake at 2:46am but, measuring only 1.8 on the Richter scale, you’d have had to be standing very nearby to actually feel it.

The UK media went predictably nuts over the earthquake early on but managed to calm down by about lunch time when they realised that they weren’t going to find any scenes of gore and devastation.

You can read the full British Geological Survey Press Release here.[pdf]

Some more on this Earthquake:

According to the USGS, it was a magnitude 4.7 (Richter) earthquake centred approximately 30 miles south of Kingston-upon-Hull.

A link to full USGS details is here

Update 2:36am: Alternatively, according to the BGS, it was a 5.1, possibly 5.3 Update: Later revised back to a 5.2 in a BGS press-release. The BGS wesbite is here but go easy on clicking, they seem to be down under the load just now.

The thing is, as I can tell from various web forums, the quake was felt over pretty much the whole of England and some parts of Wales. Pardon me for being in awe, but that’s a lot of mass-in-motion

Apparently, it was felt strongly in Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham. Unfortunately, some sheeple from distant parts of the country are already phoning their favorite TV stations in the customary state of feigned distress and the news outlets are gearing up for a “The Day The Earth Shook” style newsgasm or two. No doubt there’ll be a couple of comparisons to other far, far, larger earthquakes due to various newscaster’s failure to grasp that the Richter scale is logarithmic rather than linear.

It’s not readily apparent if there has been any damage or injuries but most if not all UK structures should withstand a magnitude 4.7 earthquake assuming they’re properly designed (although I can think of a conservatory or two which might have fallen down ).

Or perhaps more of a ‘tremor’ - relatively pathetic by international standards I should think.

At about 12:55am, I felt a mild East-West shaking motion here in North Warwickshire, lasting 5-10 seconds at a frequency of about 2Hz. A friend in the Harborne area of Birmingham felt a stronger up/down thrusting motion but did not tell me the frequency. Although there was no noise or apparent damage in Harborne, he reported loss of his cable internet connection and emergency services sirens immediately after the earthquake.

I suspect if the epicentre was nearby, this would be a milder quake than the 2002 earthquake which reached 5.0 on the Richter scale.

At this time, the BBC has the beginnings of a news report here. [potential sensationalism warning]

EuroNCAP, the European New Car Assessment Program have released their findings on the crashworthiness of the Nissan Navara SUV/Pickup.

The Navara’s passenger compartment became unstable in the impact and would have been unable to withstand greater loading. The chassis rail collapsed on the impacted side, allowing a significant level of intrusion into the driver’s footwell…

As tested, the vehicle performed incredibly badly, scoring just 1 star out of 5 and even this star was struck through due to an unacceptably high risk of head injury to front-seat occupants. In the frontal-impact test video which demonstrates the vehicle hitting an offset deformable barrier. Even to the untrained eye, the entire structure seems weak, easily deforming in areas intrusive to the passenger compartment. To add further injury, the seatbelt pretensioners and airbags fire late, in one instance it appears the passenger’s head almost completely misses the airbag.

The Nissan Navara is a ‘luxury’ pickup that you are more likely to see badly parked on a kerb outside a primary school than on rugged off-road terrain so it would seem important that the Navara can withstand normal crashes. On the subject of the school-run, the Navara does get a 3 out of 5 rating for a child occupant in an isofix seat in the rear of the passenger cabin. The cynic in me, however, wonders if that child might become an orphan in the event of a crash in the Navaro. I’ve always had the impression that this sort of vehicle is bought by parents as sort of an ‘armoured personnel carrier’ for their kids to make up for the shortcoming in their own driving ability. In the case of the Navara, this could be an unfortunate mistake.

Nissan are apparently modifying the production Navaras to eliminate the faulty airbag deployment and pretensioners. However, with the passenger compartment becoming unstable at 40mph and being ‘unable to withstand greater loading’, it’s difficult to see how the Navara could make significant improvement in a retest.

I’m not sure whether the older ‘4 star’ ratings are directly transposable to the 5-star ratings but if they are, the Rover Metro/100 actually achieves a higher score than the Navara Pick-Up at 1 complete star out of 4.

According to a BBC clip on the issue, some are calling for the Navara to be recalled. While I would agree that a recall may be justified to fix the airbag issues, there probably isn’t much that can be done for the overall cabin structure after the vehicle has left the assembly line (or perhaps even the drawing board).

Note: The EuroNCAP article refers to a Nissan Navaro in the title but references a test on a Navara. I believe the tested vehicle is the Navara - I’m not sure where ‘Navaro’ comes from, whether it’s a variant or import - perhaps just a typo, if anyone knows, please tell me in the comments section below. References in this article are now changed to Navara.