Offshore Wind Projects Raise Concerns Over Maritime Safety and Search-and-Rescue Operations

0:00 Speaker 1 Well, with us today is a good friend and one smart lady, Bonnie Brady. Well, she lives in Long Island, and she comes to our breakfasts in Southampton often. And, well, Bonnie Brady, you represent all of Long Island. You represented other people. Tell us, you’re representing a larger number of people now than ever before. Tell us who you represent.

0:25 Speaker 2 I am indeed, John. Hi, thank you so much for having me. Good morning. I am the policy director for the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association. We represent commercial fishermen from New Jersey all the way up to Maine. And I’m really glad to have this opportunity to speak because I am spitting mad and want all of your listeners

0:46 to know what’s going on out on the water. Well, we’re actually in Washington right now, and what happened seven years ago, we lost a boat called the Mistress out of Rhode Island. Oscar Diaz is coming back.

1:00 Speaker 1 And the guy doing the... He was on last week on our show last Sunday.

1:07 Speaker 2 Right, Mike Lombardi. He did the Green Oceans. They did a report, and they were able to find the... remains of the boat, the fishing vessel Mistress, 50 feet away from one of the jacket foundations.

1:21 Speaker 1 So it looks like it looks like that boat. It looked like that boat hit the windmill. And that’s what crushed it and went down.

1:31 Speaker 2 You know, John, I’m not sure that that’s the case. I happened to do the Freedom of Information Act call on the MISLA, it’s called M-I-S-L-E, the Marine Report of the Coast Guard when that boat went down in 2023.

1:45 And what it did say in those documents, the search and rescue helicopter comes from Cape Cod, Air Station Cape Cod. It’s an MH-60 Jayhawk. It went to the scene. And the only– they talked about low visibility. I think it was a ceiling of about 100 to 300 feet and wind.

2:04 And the hazard they mentioned probably eight times in the report, wind turbines. Now, I went so far as to call a guy in Boston today. after I got that report, someone who used to work as a helicopter pilot for the Coast Guard and did hundreds of search and rescue missions.

2:22 And that person basically told me, we always fly when it’s one to 300 visibility and the weather is crap. That’s nothing new. That’s standard operating procedure for us. You don’t normally have problems in a bright, sunny day. Forget about that. The issue was very clearly the hazard of wind turbines. And John, you’ve heard me say this so

2:44 many times, I’m sure you’re ready to heave. Search and rescue doesn’t work with wind turbines. You can’t, the marine radar or any radar that would need to look into an area, especially at night when it’s blowing 40 to 50 miles an hour and you’ve got 10 to 15 foot seas, you use something called your radar. And if

3:05 your radar, which is a line of sight, just like an arrow pointing from wherever you are directly in front of you, hits a giant steel forest, or in this case, five, only five turbines and provides clutter or scatter so they can’t just figure out what’s what or where they’re going.

3:25 They aborted the mission, John. Now, what happened apparently when it started, because I read the report over and over again, they were taking on some water. They were heading back. The captain got both his son and his nephew to got them in their Gumby suits, which are the orange suits, you know, for floating. They put out a mayday. He

3:45 was below turbine two. He put out one more mayday, apparently closer to one. Now, remember, you’ve heard me say this too. When you have these giant turbines in the water, not only do they affect the wind because of the blades going across so that behind them there’s less wind, but also in the water they create scour. Why? Because

4:07 the water has current. It moves. So if you’re in a boat and you are heading past this large metal thing in a huge storm, if the current’s going in the direction of where that tower is, guess where your boat’s going to go? I don’t know if they hit it or not. We’d have to be able to try

4:25 to find out from what’s left down on that ocean floor. But the reality is they could have gotten pulled into the area. And if someone tried to turn the wheel quickly to get away because they knew they were like a almost like a rapid river ride.

4:39 Speaker 1 I’ve been on boats. And you’ve been on boats, and if a big swell comes up, it could push you 300 feet into it.

4:48 Speaker 2 Exactly. It could push you, or if you’re trying to get away from it, what do you do? You turn the wheel hard, and with the boat already having issues with water, it could have rolled over. We know that the son who was up in the rigging trying to get the raft off of the boat got thrown into

5:05 the rigging when the boat rolled over. He never saw his father again, apparently. He never saw, according to the Coast Guard report, he never saw his cousin. And he held on to some part of the boat until I guess it sank. At that point, they had a raft, the rescue raft, released from the boat. They’ve got something

5:22 called a hydrostatic release. It releases, it adds air, and then it floats to the top. And he got in it. And a boat called the Captain Bly, about 30 minutes racing to the scene, they picked him up. That was it.

5:35 Speaker 1 He’s a very lucky kid.

5:38 Speaker 2 Oh, he’s an incredibly lucky kid. But, I mean, my God, he lost his dad and he lost his cousin. And here we find out now, seven years later, the boat’s right at Turbine One. But here’s the part.

5:48 Speaker 1 There’s a bigger investigation, and we only have a minute or so left. The bigger investigation is.

5:53 Speaker 2 The bigger investigation.

5:55 Speaker 1 Who did those companies, the original companies, which included one of the countries, pay off in campaign funds... to create those windmills.

6:07 Speaker 2 Well, here’s part of the problem, though, John. They did maintenance as soon as April of 2019. We saw in the pictures in that report that was in the Washington Times, if anyone wants to go and look at it, where you can see the spud marks right next to that boat.

6:26 Somebody knew. What did they know and when did they know it? And the people involved, it was Deepwater Wind that then became Orsted, Danish Kingdom of Denmark, 51% owned. Do you know why they probably didn’t say a darn word?

6:39 Because you would have had to have had people down there looking, the radar, the divers. They don’t just find up anywhere and just stick their stuff wherever.

6:46 Speaker 1 So say it very slowly so everybody understands it in English language. Okay. So you think the incident happened in 2019, and say slowly what happened.

7:00 Speaker 2 In April and in August, apparently they did maintenance work on that turbine. In order to do it, they take something called a jack-up vessel that’s just like a giant 350, 400-foot boat that basically is kind of on stilts. And what they do is they plant the stilts on the ocean floor, and then they jack up the boat so

7:21 they can work on the turbines. They had to have known when they were putting that up, if that was near the boat, they had to have seen it. But why wouldn’t they have told anyone, John? Because they didn’t have the proof. It would have screwed up the deal.

7:42 Search and rescue could not be completed when you have a wind farm. And this is not just for fishermen. This is for anybody on a boat, whether you’re a tanker, whether you’re a yacht, whether you’re a pilot, anybody.

7:55 Speaker 1 Bonnie, to be continued. You know why? This is important, and it’s affecting our cost of electricity. It’s affecting our national defense, et cetera, et cetera. Thank you so much.

8:09 Speaker 2 Possibly their lives, John.

8:11 Speaker 1 Yes. And this is going to be continued. Thank you so much.

8:14 Speaker 2 Thank you so much. Thank you.