Farm Bureau speaker presents 'Day in the Life of a wind technician'

Wind technician Mitch Bjorklund has worked on turbines across the United States, from the Canadian border to south Texas and from New York to Wyoming, and nearly every state in between.
He said something all those wind farms have in common is hazards for wind technicians.
“Everyone who climbs wears a harness,” Bjorklund told a group gathered for the Rock County Farm Bureau annual meeting Wednesday, Aug. 16, in the Take 16 event center. “It will save your life.”
He held up his 30-pound harness and gear with heavy duty tie hooks.
“If I’m on top of the tower and I fall, the farthest I’m falling is 6 feet,” Bjorklund said during his guest talk titled, “A Day in the Life of a Wind Technician.”
He said 120 meters of rope is packed into his gear. It will reach from the top of a 300-foot-tall tower to the bottom, and technicians can rappel the distance in under a minute.
In addition to the possibility of falling, other job hazards include electrocution, hydraulics and the possibility of being crushed during crane work.
“Safety is paramount,” he said. “You can be scared of the risks, but you sure have to respect them and not get complacent. When you get complacent, that’s when things start going wrong.”
He said the weather often presents some of the biggest risks.
“With the high temps forecast for this week … those towers are steel tubes and Fiberglas with hot running machinery, and they do not provide us with air conditioning,” Bjorklund said.
“On the flip side there’s the cold. This is Minnesota. We get to negative 20 before a wind chill … If we have to go up a tower that went down overnight, that steel and Fiberglas can ruin your hands.”
He said if there’s lightning within 60 miles of a work site, they don’t climb. If they’re already in the tower, they wrap up their work quickly and get down.
Bjorklund said as a technician he gets to do everything with wind turbines except build them.
“I’ve changed oil in gear boxes, I’ve done maintenance and troubleshooting, I’ve helped cranes swap out gear boxes and blades and I’ve done a lot of walkouts,” he said.
A “walkout” is a third-party inspection that reviews a “meticulous checklist” on turbines before new owners take over.
While some of the work is tedious, Bjorklund said he enjoys his job.
“The view from the towers is phenomenal, and there’s no micromanaging,” he said. “It’s just you and your partner in the tower, and you’re getting your work done. That to me is just wonderful. There’s not a lot of exterior pressure.”
Bjorklund started working on towers at age 20 in 2013 after completing his education at Minnesota West in Canby.
His current work site is the Next Era wind farm near Lake Benton.