“We don’t really have a lot of information on it. “What I’m finding is a lot of people don’t really know what’s going on,” Small said. Small said many participants did not seem to have evidence on the survey’s exact impact. “I’m trying to educate myself,” said Casey Small, a teacher who lives in Cape May, almost two hours away from Sunday’s rally. Others came to the protest via friends and local Facebook groups. Gehring said that outside whales, residents of Ocean City were complaining that offshore wind projects were causing their houses to shake.īoth felt that more time and research was needed to understand how offshore wind projects affect the environment. “Also, what’s real is common sense,” Michelle Gehring, a stay-at-home mom, also from Ocean City, added. “Even though we don’t have the facts yet, the facts will come – but we’re seeing the evidence with our own eyes,” Wetzel said. Wetzel works in a primary school and became involved through whale advocacy work in Ocean City. “I’ve gotten lots of information from different sources, and you can’t argue with the fact that 10 whales have washed up,” said Kim Wetzel, 57, an Ocean City resident. Many attendees of Sunday’s rally are locals to the New Jersey coast and say they came out to express their concern. Noaa fisheries research on the 183 total whale deaths found that 40% of them resulted from human interaction, either from ship strikes or netting entanglement. “It’s just a cynical disinformation campaign,” Greenpeace oceans director John Hocevar said to USA Today.Īnd even though the agency considers the whale deaths unusual, a statement from Noaa fisheries officials added: “here is no evidence to support speculation that noise resulting from wind development-related site characterization surveys could … cause mortality of whales, and no specific links between recent large whale mortalities and currently ongoing surveys.” Many raising alarms on recent whale deaths have pointed to noise created by offshore wind survey work as confusing the whale’s navigation system.īut scientists argue that current evidence does not support such a claim. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) fisheries division, which investigates such whale deaths, has called them “unusual mortality events”.Īs organizers at Sunday’s protest argued for a moratorium on wind turbines in the area, others say there is no evidence to support claims that wind turbines are the cause of the whale deaths. Last Monday, a ninth humpback whale was found dead in Manasquan, New Jersey. ![]() Since 2023, at least 10 whales have washed ashore on the New York and New Jersey coastlines. “You are the ocean’s voice,” said organizer Cindy Zipf, encouraging protesters to get in touch with their local officials. ![]() Holding signs reading “Save the Whales” and “Whale Lives Matter” on Sunday, World Whale Day, a coalition of ocean conservationist groups and homegrown activists argued that local wind turbine survey projects were harming marine wildlife.
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