By Chris Rotolo
The body of an infant whale that washed up on the Keansburg beachfront in December was part of an unprecedented cluster of whale deaths along the New York and New Jersey shores over the last 40 days.
That 12-foot sperm whale was one of seven endangered whales to wash ashore over the last six weeks and could be connected to an eighth incident, after visitors to Assateague State Park in Maryland discovered the body of a 20-foot humpback whale Monday, Jan. 16.
The park is situated approximately 120 miles from Brigantine, where the Marine Mammal Stranding Center confirmed the death of a 12-ton female whale Jan. 12, which, according to the organization, succumbed to blunt force trauma injuries consistent with a vessel strike.
An Ongoing Debate
Whether or not these incidents can be attributed to preconstruction wind-energy activities being conducted in New Jersey’s coastal waters is an ongoing debate among Gov. Phil Murphy, state lawmakers, climate change groups and marine environmental safety organizations like the Long Branch-based Clean Ocean Action.
In a Jan. 17 interview with The Two River Times, Clean Ocean Action executive director Cindy Zipf called for an immediate and comprehensive investigation of these deaths with full transparency and independent scientific oversight of the operation.
“As a state community, we have embarked on a massive industrialization of our coastal waters at a speed and scale that has never occurred anywhere in the history of mankind, and there’s been no due diligence, period,” Zipf said. “This entire process has been fast-tracked. The focus has been on the construction of infrastructure as quickly as possible and I don’t think the public is aware of it. Unfortunately, it’s taken these whales to raise the alarm for us.”
How Did We Get Here?
In March 2021, the U.S. departments of energy, interior and commerce communicated an initiative to increase the country’s offshore wind capacity to 30 gigawatts by 2030. This lofty goal required the development of thousands of additional wind turbines in Atlantic and Pacific coastal waters.
In April 2022, the New Jersey Economic Development Authority inked an agreement with Orsted Offshore North America. The deal cleared a path for the construction of Ocean Wind 1, the state’s first wind energy farm, which will be built 13.8 miles off the coast of Atlantic City and feature 99 wind turbines situated in 108 acres of open ocean. Orsted also holds the lease to an adjacent section of marine acreage for Ocean Wind 2, a project that is expected to be larger in scale.
The Orsted installations are two of nine wind farm projects in motion in New Jersey’s coastal waters, after the U.S. Department of Interior auctioned off 488,000 marine acres to six companies Feb. 23, 2022. The winning bids totaled $4.37 billion.
These bids are in addition to one awarded Feb. 17, 2022, by the state of New York to the Empire Wind Project, an effort spearheaded by British Petroleum and Equinor. The project features an 80,000-acre marine parcel located approximately 18 miles from the Gateway National Recreation Area at Sandy Hook.
Placing the Blame
Despite demands from New Jersey legislators like Gerry Scharfenberger (R-13), Victoria Flynn (R-13) and Vince Polistina (R-2) to immediately suspend all offshore wind development activities until further investigation of the whale deaths can be conducted, Murphy said he did not believe pausing sea floor preparations was necessary at this time.
In a Jan. 13 statement to the Associated Press, Murphy cited a study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which could not attribute any of the whale deaths to offshore wind industrialization activities.
“(The NOAA) have said (these types of whale deaths have) been happening at an increased rate since 2016, and that was long before there was any offshore wind activity,” said Murphy, who hopes to achieve 100 percent clean energy in the Garden State by 2050. “It looks like some of these whales have been hit by vessels.”
Though Zipf admits there is no way to directly tie wind energy activities to the whale deaths at this time, she perceives there to be a logical progression.
“Why wouldn’t the 11 off-shore wind-related companies be suspected?” Zipf asked. “They are currently authorized to conduct preconstruction and construction activities… When has there ever been this many industrial activities permitted in the region at the same time?”
Unanswered Questions
Companies like Orsted are currently approved to map the seafloor in their project areas, which includes the use of sonar technologies and other geotechnical abilities to test the texture and features of their sites.
According to Zipf, the use of these technologies can disorient marine life, causing disruption to their migration, breeding, feeding and sheltering patterns.
In a May 2022 interview with The Two River Times, Zipf asked legislators to curtail this massive industrialization of coastal waters and instead move forward with a smaller-scale project, which could be studied to determine the potential costs and benefits.
“Where is the evidence that these projects will produce the results we have been promised? What does it actually take to build a turbine the size of the Chrysler Building, let alone thousands? What happens when you need to replace a turbine blade the size of the Statue of Liberty? What about the fact we don’t really have a good way to recycle those broken blades? Where is the motivation coming from to push all this through? It’s alarming because we don’t have a lot of answers,” Zipf said.
The article originally appeared in the January 19 – 25, 2023 print edition of The Two River Times.
