Marthas Vineyard Turbine Electric Cables Vs Loggerhead Turtles

Story Credit Facebook : Bruce Mandel

Munchkin, the 330-pound rehabilitated loggerhead turtle released early last week, spent July 4th and the 5th hanging out of Nantucket. The track of her travel matches the route of Vineyard Wind's proposed undersea cable. The cable's electro-magnetic field will disrupt sea turtle navigation.

The New England Aquarium equipped Munchkin with a satellite tag and is tracking the largest sea turtle ever rescued in the region.

After her release, Munchkin swam across Nantucket Sound in just over 30 hours.

She was on a clear track to swim through the channel that separates Nantucket from Martha’s Vineyard and veered veered west toward the Chappaquiddick shore on Martha’s Vineyard at midnight on July 4.

She surfaced there and had multiple readings over a few hours but then turned and swam southeast on a straight line toward Muskeget Island off the western tip of Nantucket.

This sea turtle's track matches the path of the proposed undersea Vineyard Wind cable. That cable will emit electo-magnetic fields which disrupt sea turtles navigational ability. Sea turtles navigate by interfacing with electromagnetic fields (EMFs) under the ocean's surface. The three turtle species affected by the project – Kemp's Ridley, Leatherback, and Loggerhead – are protected under the Federal Endangered Species Act. By definition, the project’s impacts on these listed species are significant and require mitigation. However, the Vineyard Wind Draft Environmental Impact Study ("DEIS") describes the impacts as “minor” without presenting supporting documentation or references. Nor does the DEIS offer mitigation measures nor an alternative capable of avoiding or reducing those impacts. The proliferation of EMFs from hundreds of miles of undersea cables from Vineyard Wind's 89 industrial wind generators and almost 1,375 future wind turbine generators planned for the six leasehold developments will confuse and negate the sea turtles' navigation system. The sea turtles lose their way due to the effects of EMFs, and then they become stranded and die. Recent monitoring studies show that sea turtles in New England are now becoming stranded in greater numbers and with greater frequency than any time in history. According to some scientists, the sharp rise is sea turtle strandings are likely due to EMF interference from man-made objects, especially those that create their own EMFs, such as undersea cables. Off-shore wind turbine generator projects connect each wind turbine to service platforms and to an on-shore relay station platform via undersea cables. Those transmission cables are jet plowed into the sea floor, buried just a few feet under the seabed and emit electromagnetic signals, which will disrupt sea turtle navigation. The DEIS does not disclose or analyze this impact. There is inadequate assessment of the project's impacts on sea turtles.

Further to the issue of EMFs, according to the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association in their letter submission to BOEM, representing New York’s commercial fishermen throughout Long Island, they requested BOEM to reopen the public comment period re the Draft Environmental Impact Statement of Vineyard Wind’s (VW’s) offshore wind Construction and Operation Plan (COP) south of Nantucket. They assert “…(t)here is nothing that will have a greater detrimental effect on the long-term productivity of the area south of Nantucket, within the Vineyard Wind WEA, then creating an offshore wind energy site there, destroying the ocean via pile driving, jet plowing and crisscrossing the ocean floor with miles of EMF-laden transmission cables in a dynamic tide environment in an area that not only harvests millions of pounds of seafood for humans each year, but feeds the entire ecosystem each summer, whales, birds, turtles, and man. It will be an environmental crisis of epic proportions, one that can be avoided.