Reprinted with permission from Legal Riot
by Leslie Eastman
I will continue to monitor the situation with offshore blade failures at Vineyard Farm near Nantucket. The city is preparing to file a lawsuit after Vineyard Wind shut down its newly installed wind turbines weeks ago due to malfunctions at the facility.
After one blade failed and ended up in the water, the beach was littered with sharp shards of fiberglass, which was sub-optimal during the peak summer tourist season. An ongoing investigation into the cause of this environmental pollution incident has determined that manufacturing defects in the blades were the cause of the failure.
This weekend, a “fleet” of about two dozen commercial and recreational fishing boats sailed to the wind farm on Sunday to protest offshore wind development.
The vessels, flying anti-offshore wind flags and sounding their whistles, departed early Sunday morning from ports along the coast of New Bedford, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, Rhode Island and Cape Town, and at noon Left and right meet at the site of a damaged vineyard wind turbine.
“The blade collapse was an eye-opener for a lot of people who didn't know offshore winds were a bad thing to the ocean,” said Capt. Shawn Machie, 54, of the F/V Scallop in New Bedford. A disaster.
… The “fleet” protest was organized by the New England Fishermen Stewardship Association (NEFSA). The plan was put into motion as Captain Dan Pronk of the lobster boat F/V Black Earl collected pieces of a turbine that washed up on the Nantucket coast. He called March and other New England fishermen, who said they felt they had to “do something before it was too late,” March said.
“We feel like our work is just seen as collateral damage,” March said. “We are regulated for sustainability. That makes sense. We need regulation. But offshore winds can kill fish and destroy nurseries without any controllable stopping point.
Protesters say their industry will be affected more severely than many imagine… because they will not be able to trawl their former fishing grounds.
Otto Osmers, a commercial fisherman from Martha's Vineyard, set off from Menemsha at 7 a.m. Sunday and arrived at the Vineyard Wind site around 10:30 a.m. Osmers acknowledged that offshore wind projects such as Vineyard Wind could impede trawling and crab fishing routes, but there were other concerns about the project. “The ocean is one of the last unexplored places on Earth,” he said of the sight of so many large turbines on the horizon. “We put cables there, but it's basically untapped. It's sad to see it go.
Others are more dissatisfied. Sue Zarba, who fishes recreationally with her husband, John, said she was excited to see the size of the turbines. “That was the first time I was near a turbine, and I was sobbing,” she said in an interview after the protest. “Once you've seen this offshore wind farm, you can't ignore it. Soon, more than a thousand acres of land near the coast will be covered with turbines. We will never eliminate this man-made environmental disaster.
“This cannot continue because that's where we fish,” Zalba said. “They are developing a tuna fishery. You can't fish around the turbines and you can't trawl.” She added that her son, who was attending the protest, was initially skeptical of her protest but changed his mind after seeing the turbines.
However, their protests fell on deaf ears. The US National Marine Fisheries Service has issued a new biological opinion for its flagship offshore wind project Vineyard, concluding that driving the final 15 monopiles of the array will not adversely affect endangered whales and other marine wildlife.
“This will not have an impact on any designated critical habitat,” NOAA Fisheries said in a statement. “NOAA Fisheries anticipates that the ESA-listed No whales, including North Atlantic right whales, will suffer serious injury or death. “With the mitigation measures, all impacts to North Atlantic right whales will be limited to temporary behavioral disturbances,” the agency said.
In short, fishermen are doing what environmentalists have done in the past.
Relevant
