On a cloudy fall day in 2023, Alfred Pebria and his fellow construction workers were installing a wind turbine in Solano County, California. They were trying to hoist a nacelle — a several-hundred-thousand-pound structure the size of a single-wide trailer that holds a turbine’s generator — to the top of a 344-foot tower. But part way up, the crane froze. “Can’t come down, can’t come up,” Pebria recalled. “Only thing that is coming up is the winds.”
The wind started whipping at the nacelle. Pebria made sure the taglines — long ropes used to stabilize a load — were taut so it wouldn’t take out the crane. Meanwhile, workers stood inside the tower, which gyrated in the wind. “It just so happened that day we had pizza for lunch,” Pebria said. “So there was pizza all over the (inside) of that tower — regurgitated pizza.”
After 45 minutes, the crew…
