Food Fight: Offshore Wind a Risk to Cultural Fabric, Fishing Industry of LBI

By Gina G. Scala | on August 07, 2023

FOOD FIGHT: For many locals and visitors, Barnegat Light scallops are a go-to item at places like Cassidy’s Fish Market. Some fishermen are voicing concern over offshore wind growth’s impact on the industry. (Photo by Ryan Morrill)

Discussions about the impact of wind farms planned off the coast of New Jersey have been in the broad sense recently, but last week two commercial fishermen brought it home to Long Beach Island.

“Our lives are on the line. We wonder whether we are going to pay our bills,” said Kirk O. Larson, who has spent more than five decades on the water as a commercial fisherman, while serving as Barnegat Light mayor for more than 30 years. “It’s not for lack of product. It’s for the brashness of these people from Europe to just come in and push us around, buy up all our fishery services people, who are quitting their jobs to go work for offshore wind companies. They are taking the best of the best.”

Larson spoke as a member of the public at the July 26 standing-room-only Save LBI forum on the promises and realities of offshore wind at the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences in Loveladies.

The Atlantic Shores offshore wind project is comprised of three phases, with the first phase expected to be approved later this year. It includes 120 turbines to be placed in the Atlantic Ocean with phase two calling for the placement of 80 turbines; phase three has 157 turbines, according to a presentation by Bob Stern, president of Save LBI.

As proposed, the wind farm would see 1,000-foot-high turbines between 9½ and 13½ miles offshore the entire length of LBI, extending farther eastward into the Atlantic Ocean. While offshore construction is expected to begin later in the decade, an exact date has not yet been set.

The project is a 50-50 partnership between Shell New Energies US LLC and EDF Renewables North America. It was formed in December 2018 to co-develop nearly 183,353 acres of leased sea area on the Outer Continental Shelf, located within the New Jersey Wind Energy Area.

“Everything is being affected. The only thing you see are the big things washing ashore on the beach,” Larson said, referencing humpback whales and dolphins that washed up on Jersey Shore beaches earlier this year. “I’ve heard they have tugboats now pulling whales offshore, so we don’t see any of them this summer. I mean this has happened. These people have money; they have clout. They have the government on their side – the federal government, the state government.”

New Jersey has seen a record-high seven humpback whale deaths this year. The 2023 whale deaths to date are the highest since 2019, when five were reported off the state’s coast during that 12-month calendar period, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries. Since the unusual mortality event for humpback whales was declared, New Jersey saw three deaths in 2016 and 2017, two in 2018, five in 2019, four in 2020 and 2022, and none in 2021, according to NOAA figures.

Federal officials have rejected any connection between wind project activity and the recent whale deaths, saying sonar equipment has been used all over the world and “no historical stranding events” have been associated with the use of similar systems. In March, the state Department of Environmental Protection echoed those comments, saying in its first statement on the whale deaths that it was “aware of no credible evidence that offshore wind-related survey activities could cause whale mortality. While the DEP has no reason to conclude that whale mortality is attributable to offshore wind-related activities, (the) DEP will continue to monitor.”

“People love whales. They are amazing creatures,” Larson said. “Also, the fishermen, we love our scallops. We love to go fishing. We love to hear people say how great our seafood is in Barnegat Light. We take a lot of pride (in that).”

“We love your scallops, too,” an audience member called out.

“Thank you,” Larson responded. “We want to keep the prices down. So, talk to your friends, your neighbors” who might not know about the dangers of the impact of offshore wind development and the industrialization of the ocean.

Earlier in the evening, Jim Gutowski, a scallop fisherman and Viking Village fleet owner, said he’d had an opportunity to travel to England and Scotland in 2018 to see first-hand some of the wind farms there.

“We visited Scotland’s fishermen associations, and it wasn’t good,” he said. “These guys were not allowed to fish inside any of these wind fields. Down in England, you were allowed to fish in them. We went out and we sat in the middle of these turbines, and it was … it really is a scary thing.”

The 100 turbines put out three megawatts each, for a total of 300 megawatts of energy, Gutowski said.

“They were told they could fish in there. Unfortunately, they weren’t doing a lot of fishing in there because the fishing had kind of died off,” he said. “So, we talked to a lot of fishermen liaisons, and their take home to us was to get involved at the early stage of the process. I think we’ve done a good job of that.”

Still, Gutowski said the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management makes it difficult to work with it, and despite asking a lot of questions about proposed offshore wind, “(we) never seem to get any answers, and the process just seems to plow forward.”

With so many of the wind farm lease areas are in the middle of scallop grounds, Gutowski said he’s concerned with the impact of seismic and acoustic testing on scallop larvae, including how they flow downstream; where they land; what the success rate is; and how it affects scallop mortality.

“We have closed an area, proactively as fishermen, for two years. We are due to get access into there this year to harvest a large scallop that we protected,” he said, referring to an area that overlaps with an offshore wind lease zone. “And as these tests are going on, our seasonal surveys are showing that we are having an abundance of flowers, which is scallops with nothing in them.”

Gutowski reiterated Larson’s earlier comments about offshore wind impacting every area, saying it goes beyond whales, porpoises and scallops down to plankton and, ultimately, all food sources.

“My take-home is what’s the rush? Why are we jamming this in such a large manner? Why don’t we test it?” he said, pointing to Block Island, R.I., where the first wind turbines in the nation have been operating since 2016, when they replaced diesel generators. “From what I hear, since the inception of those five, they have been online for 30% of the time.”

He said his philosophy about wind turbines isn’t about moving them from “my backyard to your backyard. It’s more of an overview of the entire project to say stop, take a break, let’s get the data.”

Concern for commercial fishing has played a role in the opposition of offshore wind farms locally for years. with Surf City Councilman Peter Hartney penning the borough’s objections to the proposed Atlantic Shores Wind Farm to BOEM while also providing comment on the environmental impact statement for the Ocean Wind project in 2021.

In his missive, he wrote, “Commercial fishing is already constrained by quotas, etc., and the economic impact of proposed projects has not been fully studied and has, to date, only been presented by Atlantic Shores as having no impact on the industry upon completion of the project without consideration for the decades of impact the construction phase of the projects will have on the commercial fishing industry.

“There is a strong, unexamined impact to the cultural fabric of LBI and the entire Jersey Shore, as the fishing industry has been part of the cultural fabric of the region since time immemorial. Thus, the detrimental economic impacts these projects would cause to the fishing industry will have significant negative ramifications for the local culture – with the loss of the fishing industry comes a loss of cultural identify and livelihood.”

— Gina G. Scala

[email protected]

You must be logged in to post a comment.