A video captured in Palladam, a city in southern India, shows a wind turbine spinning wildly out of control, on flames. The combination of the fire and the rotation of the turbine's blades produces an incredible spiral smoke pattern which we see drift away with the wind. Over at Wired, they calculated the conditions that led to this spiral smoke pattern by modeling one of the turbine blades with VPython.
Wind turbines are not supposed to spin this fast. If the wind is over a certain speed, the turbine has a function that will lock or rotate the blades to reduce torque. We're not sure what went wrong here, but it sure is amazing to watch.