'Area closed'
Thanks to everyone who left comments at my article published at RESCUE last week about offshore wind. If you haven't read it yet, the link is below, please take a look. Meanwhile...
As an update, on July 2 a young female minke whale was observed floating dead in New Bedford harbor. She was lifted by a heavy-duty crane and put on a flatbed truck to be delivered, according to the New Bedford Light, to researchers in Cape Cod for a necropsy.
And as if the whale was giving us a message — if you believe in such things — she ended up at a marine terminal that is being turned into a “staging area for the offshore wind industry.” New Bedford is also where several gigantic towers arrived by ship from Portugal, unloaded at the end of May to begin construction of Vineyard Wind located off of Martha’s Vineyard, noted by its CEO Klaus Moeller as being “the very first towers of the first turbine…” (At this point, construction is well underway with “steel in the water” as Klaus said at the beginning of June).
Giant offshore turbines vs. very tiny birds
We love our piping plovers in New Jersey. We close off recreational beach areas so they can nest unmolested, we count them, we even name them. We’re so into protecting these seven-inch, migrating shore birds, that a big beach event, the Ocean Mile Swim in Barnegat Light, may be cancelled this year — the second time in a row — because one of the nesting pairs with soon-to-be fledgling chicks was found to be on the move. The male, named Man, is marching his family “all over the place,” according to a state update. That means a 200-meter buffer must be established on all sides of the nest wherever they eventually settle.
But piping plovers have an agenda. And every year at the end of July, under cover of night they take off on a long journey south, some even going as far as the Caribbean, to return in the spring.
It appears, however, that all these protective measures to help reestablish the population of these tiny birds, listed as “Threatened” under the Endangered Species Act, end where the offshore wind turbines begin.
As discussed in the robust comments (covering a wide variety of issues) submitted by the group Save LBI to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) in response to the agency’s draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for one project, this little bird doesn’t stand a chance.
“It migrates offshore, north-south and must cross the project area in and out from their nests. If heading toward turbines, it would (be) quite difficult for a 7-inch bird to first perceive and then avoid rotating blades with a 774-foot diameter and blade tip speeds approaching 200 miles per hour creating highly turbulent conditions.”
“If the bird does detect an obstacle and tries to change course there are additional difficulties. If it is approaching the turning blades against the wind, it will experience a very significant pressure drop in front of the blades which will suck it into the blade-swept area. If it is approaching the turning blades with the wind behind it and seeks to change course it has to counter that wind speed, which is likely to be significant during operation of the turbine. If it passes through the swept area, it will experience that same pressure drop behind the blades.”
BOEM goes so far as to ridiculously state in its DEIS that the “flashing red tower lights” (required by the FAA) will somehow help alert piping plovers to the spinning obstacles directly in their migratory path.
More realistically, as researchers, led by Pamela H. Loring of the University of Massachusetts, stated in a recent study: the “risk of collision (to piping plovers) is potentially higher at night due to reduced visibility of turbines (Exo et al. 2003) and attraction or disorientation effects from artificial lighting on turbine towers.”
If, in fact, if both Atlantic Shores projects (one being the subject of the DEIS) are constructed, it will consist of 357 giant wind turbines, each up to three football fields high.
Imagine how that will look from the sky if you’re a tiny bird trying to get back to your winter home — and again in the spring when nature calls you back to New Jersey.