On behalf of my late parents, whose ashes were scattered offshore of 3R’s Beach, contact your state senators to insist they vote no on Senate Bill 265. This bill will decimate 3R’s Beach and Indian River Bay area by allowing high-voltage cabling from offshore wind turbines to run through the park and bay. My parents loved to fish at 3R’s and watch the birds in its protected dunes. Now the nature preserve of 3R’s is being sold out for a pittance and without referendum. No amount of money is worth sacrificing our coastline, our marine life and our safety.
The turbines will be the dominant visible feature at our beaches for ages. Even at 18 miles out, 726-plus feet of the planned 853- to 953-foot tall turbines will be visible all day, with airfield lights at night. 3R’s will be raped with a trench 40 feet deep through the beach and dunes to accommodate megawatt cable that continues through the back bay to the former power plant. Thousands of families boating in the bay and at 3R’s will have high-voltage cable beneath them as they recreate. We must consider the imminent danger of this cable in a shallow bay and at a beach with very strong tidal currents and people in the water!
The cable requires SONAR monitoring and reburying if exposed, causing no-boat-anchor and no-trawl-fishing zones. In 2016, Block Island’s wind farm cable became exposed from tidal action, and five years later, it was still not reburied. In New York, turbine cables are considered major transmission facilities due to their extremely high voltage. This danger requires a special siting permit process called Article VII. Their electromagnetic fields displace flounder, crabs and other sea life while disrupting migratory fish. Wind companies promise no disruptions, but Virginia residents reported cable trench drilling shook their homes like earthquakes, leaving cracks in their walls.
Construction and maintenance of the turbines will require a fleet of commercial boats and barges to inundate the Indian River beach, inlet, bay and marina. Current infrastructure may need augmentation to accommodate large vessels and trucks. Channel dredging and other destruction to commercialize the area may occur. Turbine blades need frequent replacing. A comparable Vestas V236 turbine blade is 379 feet long. Imagine the trucks and barges needed to haul that! In Scotland, trucks carrying monstrous blades block traffic and hold up in towns for weeks. Consider transporting colossal components through our busy traffic to the bay and ocean, or from gigantic shipping and ocean turbine installation vessels to local barges and housing those components around the bay. Families that flounder fish on boats in the inlet will be competing with large commercial vessels and could be sandwiched between barges and the rocks, actuating no-boating zones for days on end. Soon we will not recognize the recreational sanctuary generations of Delawareans worked so hard to create.
Without immediate action, Delaware will say hello to the industrialization of our small sanctuary shore and goodbye to the diamond of our unobstructed horizon for generations. Go to saveourbeachview.com, wind-watch.org and oceanlegaldefense.org.
-
A letter to the editor expresses a reader's opinion and, as such, is not reflective of the editorial opinions of this newspaper.
To submit a letter to the editor for publishing, send an email to newsroom@capegazette.com. Letters must be signed and include a telephone number and address for verification. Please keep letters to 500 words or fewer. We reserve the right to edit for content and length. Letters should be responsive to issues addressed in the Cape Gazette rather than content from other publications or media. Only one letter per author will be published every 30 days. Letters restating information and opinions already offered by the same author will not be used. Letters must focus on issues of general, local concern, not personalities or specific businesses.
