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A wind turbine collapsed at the Maverick Wind Energy Center in Major County, Oklahoma, on June 20, 2022. Firefighters from Ames were called out at 6:45 in the evening.

The steel tower buckled partway up and the machine came down almost on its own footprint, leaving the blades spread across the wheat field below. A resident about a mile away heard a thud and looked over to see it down. There was no fire and nobody was hurt. The turbine had been running less than a year.

The weather was calm and clear, and no severe storm reports were logged anywhere in Oklahoma that day.

No cause was ever made public. The utility said engineers would assess the site, the developer referred questions to the utility, and General Electric declined to say what had gone wrong. Seven months later it was still unexplained in print.

Two days after the Oklahoma failure, another General Electric turbine of the same model collapsed at a wind farm in Logan County, Colorado. That one was later attributed to a blade cracking and striking the tower, bringing it down. No such finding was published for the Oklahoma turbine.