Local fishermen say the turbines are hurting their livelihoods — and the environment.
Six weeks after a turbine blade broke apart at a wind farm off the coast of Nantucket, sending fiberglass shards into nearby waters that washed up on the island’s beaches, irate fishermen and residents along the Northeast coast made their voices heard.
A flotilla of 27 commercial- and recreational-fishing ships circled the broken wind turbine Sunday afternoon as part of the New England community’s efforts to protest against Vineyard Wind and the offshore wind industry. Hailing from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, and other states, fishermen descended on the offshore wind farm to raise awareness about the environmental consequences of the turbine incident.
“Potential impacts that we brought up in the past are now coming to fruition, and we still don’t have any answers,” Jerry Leeman, founder and CEO of the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association (NEFSA), told National Review. A nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to preserving the ocean, NEFSA organized Sunday’s flotilla protest.
The recently aired frustrations partly stem from Vineyard Wind’s delayed communication with Nantucket officials: The wind farm let 48 hours pass before notifying the town of the debris fallout last month.
On Saturday, July 13, one of the 350-foot-long blades of a wind turbine sustained damage during testing, causing a large chunk of the damaged blade to fall into the water five days later. Vineyard Wind maintained the blade fragments were nontoxic but urged beachgoers against picking up the sharp debris during the company’s cleanup process.
GE Vernova, the manufacturer of the new Haliade-X turbine design, later said the blade failure was caused by a “manufacturing deviation” at a Canadian factory and promised to reexamine all 150 blades produced at the plant. GE Vernova has also seen two blade failures at the Dogger Bank wind farm off the east coast of England — the first incident occurred in May and the other last week.
Back on Nantucket, Vineyard Wind has begun work to remove the damaged blade in a controlled manner as the wind farm’s operations remain partially suspended and under federal investigation by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE). The malfunction led to the brief closure of local beaches.
Despite officials’ ongoing efforts to mitigate the damage, citizens remain deeply upset as more debris has fallen from the damaged turbine in the last month.
“I have spoken to Nantucket residents who have deep concerns about their family’s well-being and the health of the environment around their island and the natural resources,” said Leeman, who lives in Harpswell, Maine.
Leeman traveled down to the site of the malfunctioned blade over the weekend after fellow captains Dan Pronk of Nantucket and Shawn Machie of New Bedford, Mass., reached out about how their livelihoods and the environment have been impacted by the turbine disaster.
“We feel like our jobs are just accepted as collateral damage,” Machie told the New Bedford Light. “We are regulated for sustainability. And that makes sense. We need regulation. But offshore wind is allowed to kill fish and wreck nurseries without any manageable stopping point.”
Since 2018, fisheries regulators and scientists have warned the federal government about the negative effects that offshore wind can have on marine life. For example, pile-driving turbines into the ocean floor can cause a “cumulative stress response” in fish that disrupts their ability to feed or spawn, resulting in permanent habitat loss for cod and other bottom-dwelling fish, three officials who lead the New England, Mid-Atlantic, and South Atlantic Fishery Management Councils wrote in a letter to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) in 2022. The noise created by turbine pile-driving is “potentially harmful to marine species” and has been “of greatest concern to marine mammal species, such as endangered whales,” according to the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
BOEM, the agency responsible for offshore wind development, has largely denied or ignored these warnings.
Protesters on some boats were seen raising signs that read “Support Your Local Fishermen” and “Save Our Squid,” according to photos posted by NEFSA on social media. In addition to keeping their businesses alive, protesters are also concerned about a lackluster squid season caused by wind-farm construction and operations in the New England region. Leeman said the drop in squid is “quite alarming” for commercial fisheries “since that wild product is the economic driver behind our ports and our infrastructures.”
The fleet of fishermen were also irked about the presence of foreign vessels in U.S. waters because of the Vineyard Wind project. From Europe, the vessels carry cranes, pile-drivers, and other equipment to continue constructing the wind farm. There are loopholes in the Jones Act that allow offshore wind developers to hire foreign crews in place of U.S. workers.
Leeman said such vessels could affect the ocean’s ecosystem. He emphasized the important role that the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act plays in conserving fishery resources. Enacted in 1976, the law created an exclusive economic zone to keep foreign fishing boats 200 nautical miles away from the U.S. coast. At the time, foreign overfishing was rampant.
Meanwhile, a separate protest took place concurrently at Cisco Beach located along the south shore of Nantucket. It was there that protesters gathered to hold hands and form a human chain. Dressed in a whale costume, one of the participants carried a sign that read “Save Me,” in reference to the threat that offshore wind construction poses to endangered North Atlantic right whales. Both protests lasted for about three hours.
The goal of the protests was to “wake people up,” Leeman said, about the environmental dangers of offshore wind.
“The U.S. citizen needs to understand it’s not that any fisherman alive doesn’t want to go green, but without the proper due diligence and studies of what’s going to happen to the natural resources and the longevity” of wind turbines, the fishing advocate said people should be rightly concerned.
As a representative of NEFSA, Leeman is willing to bring protesters’ concerns directly to Vineyard Wind leaders.