The Maine Board of Environmental Protection will soon decide whether to allow Nordic Aquafarms, a Norwegian company, to build a massive, $500 million land-based industrial fish farm in Belfast. The board’s seven members are furrowing their brows and poring over literally thousands of pages and testimony, exhibits, charts, graphs and maps.
Or not.
Many of us here in Belfast believe BEP decided on Nordic long before it wasted untold Maine tax dollars on its Nordic charade. We believe the fix was in from the get-go. How else to explain the bizarre BEP finding that Nordic has sufficient right, title and interest to even file for a permit? Nordic and its minions from away no more own a path to the sea for Nordic’s effluent discharge pipe than they own the Statue of Liberty.
The land dispute is in court right now. If that’s adequate RTI, perhaps I could interest the BEP in some Colorado beachfront.
That chicanery alone renders the BEP process an illegitimate sham. But there’s more. Nordic would destroy dozens of acres of mature forest and wetlands — and habitat of at least one threatened species, the extraordinary bobolink bird. But BEP is requiring no wildlife study.
Nordic would daily spew 7.7 millions of gallons of effluent into beautiful Belfast Bay, threatening fishing and lobstering grounds and a popular swimming hole at Northport pier, and degrading the beautiful Little River Trail. Nordic would annually devour at least 633 million gallons of water from our limited aquifer and watershed. In laying its pipe, Nordic would disrupt and disburse settled industrial mercury, further threatening fisheries, recreation and tourism. Nordic has a list of chemicals it might dump into the bay. It’s as long as your arm.
Nordic would ship mercury-laden sediment to Searsport, spilling toxic sludge along the way. BEP is requiring no study of this either. No one has even told Searsport this toxic stew will be trucked through its town in 100 trucks on their way to dumping their killer cargo in some undisclosed landfill in New Hampshire.
Nordic told a legislative committee that fish can’t escape from land-based fish farms, contradicting press reports of massive fish escapes from land-based industrial fish farms in Canada and Norway, and even contradicting Nordic’s own website. Escaped fish carry disease, compete for and destroy wild-fish spawning grounds, and mate with wild fish, producing fish unable to live in the wild.
Nordic’s magically expanding job promises now top 100, but many or most of those alleged jobs will require expertise not found in Maine. And while Nordic promises tax bonanzas, it has gorged on every tax break it can scrounge in Norway, California and Belfast. Nordic registered its U.S. business in Delaware, an infamous tax haven where it has no operations. It even got Belfast to pay half its dechlorination costs, something Belfast never did for our own Marshall Wharf Brewing Co.
The whole deal stinks, and BEP is getting ready to rubber-stamp it. What do they care? They don’t live here.
Lawrence Reichard is a resident of Belfast. He is an official intervenor in the Nordic Farms application now before the Board of Environmental Protection. He is also a freelance journalist and former columnist for The (Belfast) Republican Journal.
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