‘Bunch Of Suits Trying To Cover Their Tracks’: Beach Town Locals Slam Offshore Wind Developer For Polluting Shores

Residents of Nantucket, Massachusetts, spoke out on Wednesday at a town hall against a wind power company for a “turbine blade failure incident” that resulted in debris washing up along the beach.

Officials of the small island town located 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod were forced to shut down beaches on the south shore on Tuesday due to “large floating debris and sharp fiberglass shards,” according to a statement posted to Facebook by the Nantucket Harbormaster’s office. During the town hall, locals accused Vineyard Wind — an offshore wind development company that operates near the island — of taking too long to notify the community and clean up the site, according to videos of the event posted on X by the Nantucket Current.

“This happened Saturday night… There was no notice to mariners until Monday; that’s unacceptable. The town wasn’t informed until Monday,” Nantucket charter boat captain Bobby DeCosta said during the town hall. “There’s nobody in this room that’s been to that sight. I guarantee it. We’ve got a bunch of suits here trying to cover their tracks,” DeCosta continued, gesturing towards the Vineyard Wind representatives present at the meeting.

DeCosta also said that the cleanup response should have occurred much sooner, stating that anyone with prior knowledge of the prevailing winds in the area knew the wind would ultimately reach Nantucket’s shores.

“Anyone with any kind of water knowledge knows that the tide out there around this wind farm goes northeast/southwest and the prevailing wind in the summer is southwest, and this stuff was going to end up on the beach,” DeCosta said. “They had to do a tide analysis before they even started this project, so this is a bunch of crap when they say, ‘Oh, we had to do a study to see where this stuff was going to go’… They were hoping it wasn’t going to go on the beaches so they wouldn’t have to deal with it as much.”