Erie School Board votes to remove wind turbine after years of disrepair

ERIE — The Erie School Board voted unanimously to remove its wind turbine at a special school board meeting July 10.

The project will begin early next month and was awarded to DW Zinser Demolition of Walford, Iowa for $258,290 and will be paid out of the board’s Capital Projects fund.

According to Erie CUSD 1 Superintendent Chuck Milem, the wind turbine was installed in 2005 by Johnson Controls but had problems from the start. In 2008, maintenance crews got it working to the best of their ability until the past five years, when it stopped working.

“I don’t know that it ever worked completely properly,” Milem said. “Because it was a one-of-a-kind that wasn’t replicated anywhere else, there weren’t any service parts available. There are others of the same brand, but their interiors are completely different.”

Milem said that after several years of discussions and engineers trying to remedy the problem, they decided that repairing the wind turbine was impossible.

“We were left with a few options at that point, one of them being to replace the existing turbine with a new one, but that was too costly,” Milem said.

“At 20 years, they tend to get towards the end of their lifecycle. So, we decided to bring it down.”

Milem said the project will take four weeks. The first week involves setup and mobilization. In the second week, rigging cranes will carefully lower the wind turbine. Next, crews will dismantle the turbine in the third week, with the fourth week dedicated to cleanup and reseeding the ground.

“I believe the school board 20 some years ago was trying to be progressive and make smart financial decisions for the district,” Milem said. “This just didn’t work out exactly as planned.”

Milem does not anticipate the work will cause any detours or disruption to traffic as the turbine is just southeast of the middle school on a back corner lot.