September 9, 2013 Ariel Wittenberg Leave a response

Whaleboat regatta concludes with Azorean wins

NEW BEDFORD — The Azorean boats proved their supremacy Sunday on the final day of the whaleboat racing regatta with teams from the Azorean Islands of Pico and Faial winning the rowing and sailing contests, respectively. Six boats, three Azorean-made and three Yankee-made, competed in the Dabney Cup race with single heats in rowing and sailing.

In rowing, all the Azorean boats finished before their Yankee counterparts. In the sailing competition, a Yankee boat representing the New Bedford Whaling Museum was able to sneak between two Azorean boats to come in second.

The results of the races can partially be attributed to the crucial differences between the two whaleboats, according to their crews. Azorean whaleboats are 39 feet long, and are rowed by six people. Yankee boats are 10 feet shorter, but one less person rows them. So while the boats are a little lighter, they have less power, said Sara da Silva Quintal, who is the skipper of the United States women’s rowing team.

That gives the Azorean boats the advantage during a rowing contest, as was apparent Sunday when the Azorean boats triumphed.

— Read more of this article at: http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130909/NEWS/309090314

July 28, 2013 Ariel Wittenberg Leave a response

With deep pockets, AVX prepares for settlement, records show

NEW BEDFORD — City environmentalists and their supporters are gearing up for what they hope will be one last push for more money in the EPA’s settlement with harbor contaminator AVX.

Filing a motion to intervene last week, the Buzzards Bay Coalition has asked a federal judge to allow it to argue why the $366 million settlement should include a clause allowing the government to ask AVX for more money if the agreed upon figure is not enough to complete the harbor restoration.

But if environmentalists and the public figures that support them think the fight for the harbor isn’t over yet, AVX itself appears to disagree.

The electronic component manufacturer has already budgeted as though the settlement will go through, listing the full settlement amount as a liability in filings with the Securities Exchange Commission from fiscal years 2012 and 2013.

AVX is the parent company of Aerovox, a onetime electrical capacitor manufacturer whose factory was located near the Acushnet River on Belleville Avenue in New Bedford from the 1940s through the 1970s. During that time, the factory was the primary source of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) contamination in the harbor.

In its filings, AVX acknowledges that its settlement to clean the harbor of the cancer-causing toxins has yet to be approved by a federal judge and that “the timing of any such approval is uncertain.”

But that didn’t stop the company from recording “environmental charges” of $100 million in fiscal year 2012 and $266.3 million in fiscal year 2013 for expenses “related to environmental issues at the New Bedford Harbor Superfund Site.”

That charge actually resulted in a net loss of $64 million for the company in fiscal year 2013, despite the $1.4 billion in total revenue AVX made that year.

Representatives of AVX did not respond to three requests for comment. The SEC filing attributes the 2013 losses to both the Superfund charges and “uncertain global economic conditions” which resulted in overall decreases in sales prices.

Without accounting for the yet-unpaid settlement charge, the company actually had a net income of $202.3 million in fiscal year 2013. In fiscal year 2012, the company’s listed $152.8 million net income was actually $252.8 million without the environmental charges.

AVX still manufactures capacitors and other electronic components such as inductors and filters. Its parent company Kyocera Electronics Corporation, which acquired AVX in the 1990s and owns 72 percent of its stock, also manufactures electronics including components for wireless phones and solar power generation.

Kyocera also recorded the same environmental liability as AVX, listing it as “selling, general and administrative expenses” in its SEC filings for fiscal years 2012 and 2013.

Because of this, the filing states, Kyocera saw a 12.4 percent increase in selling, general and administrative expenses in 2013.

Still, the company had a net income of $671 million in fiscal year 2013 with annual sales of more than $14 billion.

Kyocera did not return two requests for comment.

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June 21, 2013 Ariel Wittenberg Leave a response

State data does not support all town actions on Fairhaven turbines

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FAIRHAVEN — Town officials’ response to state noise testing of Fairhaven’s two wind turbines is inconsistent with the data collected, according to a Standard-Times review of the data. The Board of Selectmen has put the turbine developers on 30 days’ notice for breach of contract using sound sampling data that was discarded from the Department of Environmental Protection’s study. Meanwhile, the Board of Health has ordered 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. shutdowns of the turbines, despite the fact that state testing only found the turbines in violation of state law between the hours of midnight and 4 a.m.

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June 19, 2013 Ariel Wittenberg Leave a response

With South Terminal construction underway, Cape Wind permits list Rhode Island port for turbine staging

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NEW BEDFORD — Cape Wind’s federal permits list Quonset Point, R.I., as the staging area for its planned 130-turbine wind farm to be located in Nantucket Sound.

The offshore wind developer has said publicly it will use New Bedford’s South Terminal to stage its materials and equipment provided the port facility is completed within its 19-month timetable.

In order to use the new facility, Cape Wind would need to revise its construction plan with the federal Bureau of Offshore Energy Management, something it has not yet done.

— Read more of this article at: http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130619/NEWS05/306190320

June 9, 2013 Ariel Wittenberg Leave a response

Toxic legacy: Fish, fish everywhere, but not a bite to eat

NEW BEDFORD — The seagulls behind Northern Wind’s Hassey Street facility had better luck than Bobby Ramsey Wednesday afternoon. Tucked between the fish houses north of the hurricane barrier, he sat wearing cut off jeans and a camouflage hat, holding his fishing pole and hoping a striper would take the bait.

This is how Ramsey says he makes his living, earning up to $150 per day by selling the fish he catches in the harbor to friends and family, he said. No one has ever bothered him here except the seagulls, which he called annoying because they can take the smaller fish he has to throw back in.

“The stripers I got today, they weren’t long enough to keep,” he said.

Fishing in the New Bedford Harbor is something Ramsey said he knows he’s not supposed to do. Though New Bedford is the number one fishing port in the country, fishing in the harbor itself was banned by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health in 1979 because the fish can contain dangerous amounts of the cancer-causing chemicals that litter the harbor floor. Because eating the fish is dangerous, “taking” them is not allowed by state regulations.

But, Ramsey explains, “I got to eat. That’s what I care about.”

The Environmental Protection Agency states in public documents that its harbor cleanup will not be sufficient to safely allow fishing here. Simultaneously, agency officials recognize that as long as the restrictions are in place, people will continue to ignore them.

This presents a unique challenge to federal, state and city parties alike who seek to protect human health in a city that struggles with unemployment and homelessness. It’s also the ire of environmental activists who say residents have a right to a fishable harbor that they may never receive.

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April 6, 2013 Ariel Wittenberg Leave a response

Officials: Swapped envelopes led to bungled Fairhaven Board of Health election

FAIRHAVEN — Town officials are blaming a mistake made at a polling station Monday night for the confusion surrounding the disputed Board of Health race.

At an emergency meeting of the Board of Registrars Friday afternoon, Town Clerk Eileen Lowney and Town Counsel Thomas Crotty explained that poll workers swapped the envelopes for “write-in” and “hand-count” ballots Monday night, resulting in 45 votes for the health board race being counted twice.

“I doubled up a lot of these people because the machine had already counted them,” Lowney said. “There were really only two ballots to hand-count in Precinct 1.”

When voters entered their ballots into the counting machine on Monday, one of three things happened:

If the ballot was readable, the machine tallied its votes and then put it in a compartment on its right side.

If the bubbled part of the ballot was readable, but there were write-ins, the bubbled votes were tallied and then the ballot was put in a compartment on the left side of the machine for the write-ins to be counted later.

If the machine spit out the ballot and could not read it, a poll worker put the ballot in a slot in the machine where it sat in a third compartment waiting to be hand-counted.

After the polls closed, poll workers were supposed to put the write-in ballots and the hand-count ballots in envelopes labeled respectively. That’s what happened at five of the six Fairhaven precincts, but workers at Precinct 1’s polling station swapped the envelopes, officials said. So instead of counting two hand-count ballots from Precinct 1, Lowney counted 45.

— Read more of this article at: http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130406/NEWS/304060344/1004/TOWN03

March 24, 2013 Ariel Wittenberg Leave a response

Unique challenges bog down fight against nitrogen pollution

WAREHAM — Though cranberry growing season has not yet begun, the researchers at the University of Massachusetts test bog in Wareham are already hard at work.

Monitoring a cranberry bog, it turns out, is a year-long process as snow melts and rain fills the bog with water that needs to be removed. How that water is removed and where it goes and what it does is the subject of an ongoing study at the test bog about cranberry farming’s effect on nitrogen pollution in the bay.

The complicated irrigation systems of cranberry bogs make monitoring their effect on the surrounding environment difficult, according to Carolyn DeMoranville, station director at the UMass test bog.

“There is a lot of manipulation involved in keeping the ideal conditions,” she said, standing at a pump monitor amid the purple-red vines and leaves of cranberry plants last Wednesday. “It gets very complex very quickly.”

— Read more of this article at: http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20130324%2FNEWS%2F303240318%2F1001

December 31, 2012 Ariel Wittenberg Leave a response

For two Fairhaven quahoggers, industry needs all the help it can get

FAIRHAVEN — “Three at once — that’s what I like to see,” Kevin Miller shouted to his quahogging partner Michael Wolfgang Friday afternoon.

The two were waist-deep off of Nakata Avenue, on the east side of Sconticut Neck. Two weeks ago, the area opened to quahogging for the first time since it was closed by the 2002 Bouchard Oil Spill.

Miller and Wolfgang have raked the newly reopened area for a few hours per day, weather permitting, to see what they could reap from a decade’s worth of undisturbed shoreline.

“Honestly, it’s not as good as it used to be, but it never was the best area either,” Miller said.

— Read more of this article at: http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20121231/NEWS/212310320/1018/OPINION

December 16, 2012 Ariel Wittenberg Leave a response

Silence shrouds EPA plans for Upper Harbor CAD Cell

NEW BEDFORD — The Environmental Protection Agency has taken significant steps toward developing an Upper Harbor CAD cell to be located above Coggeshall Street near Riverside Park.

The CAD cell, an alternative to sending contaminated sediments off-site, would hold some of the most contaminated sediment in the harbor, according to EPA documents obtained by the Buzzards Bay Coalition through a Freedom of Information Act request that were given to The Standard-Times.

The documents include emails dating as far back as 2006 between EPA and Army Corps of Engineers officials and a 2011 Army Corps of Engineers assessment detailing the dimensions of an Upper Harbor CAD cell that Buzzards Bay Coalition President Mark Rasmussen contended is “just short of an actual contract to build it.”

Confined Aquatic Disposal (CAD) Cells are specially engineered holes to contain contaminated sediment, which have been opposed by local environmental groups who question their safety. So far, the EPA has almost exclusively publicly discussed using the technology for Superfund cleanup in the Lower Harbor. These documents outline internal planning for an Upper Harbor CAD cell by the EPA.

When asked about the documents, EPA Region 1 Administrator Curt Spalding said “There is no planning under way now for an Upper Harbor CAD cell at all.” But he said the EPA will officially consider the idea in July when it plans to reopen the Record of Decision regarding harbor cleanup.

“At that time, we would talk about different ways to remedy the harbor,” he said. “There has been no decision made whether an Upper Harbor CAD cell would be part of that discussion.”

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December 3, 2012 Ariel Wittenberg Leave a response

North Street, Fairhaven: The road that wasn’t and the town that hopes it will be

FAIRHAVEN — North Street, which runs between Adams and Cherry streets, looks like any other in Fairhaven. It’s a quiet road with few passing cars where Christmas lights and lawn reindeer have just begun to make their appearances. It’s paved, is plowed in the winter, and it receives postal and trash pickup services, just like any other public street.

Except North Street technically isn’t a public street.

Six years ago, when the Department of Public Works wanted to use state funding to repave the road, officials did what the town always has to do when using state funds: Prove that the street is town-owned by looking it up in a 4½-inch thick book of deeds in the Town Clerk’s Office.

“It was a formality, just to double check,” Town Planner Bill Roth recalled.

But when he looked in the book, North Street was nowhere to be found. It had never been formally accepted by the town and was therefore not a public road.

“I don’t know what happened to North Street,” Town Clerk Eileen Lowney said Thursday, looking at the same 4½-inch thick book. “But it’s not in here. If it was accepted, it would be.”

— Read more of this article at: http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20121203/NEWS/212030338/-1/NEWS01