The Maine Board of Environmental Protection held more than eight hours of public hearings on Nordic Aquafarms’ planned salmon recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) in Belfast, Maine, as the board begins considering whether or not to grant permits to the project.
The hearings come two year after the project was first proposed, and relate to permits Nordic Aquafarms requires in order to discharge water into the Penobscot Bay.
According to local media, a large percentage of the public comment was made up of those opposed to granting permits for the project, many of which wore red shirts to signal their opposition.
“I beg you to deny Nordic this opportunity to destroy our environment, our home, to line their pockets with gold,” Aimee Moffit of Belfast said, according to the Bangor Daily News.
The opposition to the project is nothing new for Nordic Aquafarms, which has faced repeated efforts to stop the project – all of which have so far been unsuccessful. The permit that the Maine BEP was considering, for example, was the subject of multiple objections during the initial application phase, which were all ultimately overruled when the Maine Department of Environmental Protection found that the permit application was complete.
The company has also consistently fought back against misinformation, such as misleading claims about how much water the company would require and claims that installing the needed pipes will disturb “12 tons of elemental mercury” in the Penobscot Bay discharged by chemical companies in the past.
“We have done bottom sampling along our pipe routes, and we have not found any elevated levels of mercury,” Nordic Aquafarms CEO Erik Heim said in response to opposition from Sierra Club Maine.
Other legal oppositions, however, continue, with a lawsuit related to the ownership of tidal land that Nordic Aquafarms intends to use as an area to site in- and outflow-piles ongoing. In January, the judge presiding over the case denied a motion made by Nordic Aquafarms to dismiss the ownership case related to the tidal land, according to the Bangor Daily News.
However, the same judge also dismissed a civil complaint against Nordic Aquafarms from the same people, along with a request for an injunction seeking to prevent the company from seeking more permits, citing the state’s anti-SLAPP statute, which prohibits parties from filing an inordinate number of lawsuits on one related issue.
As of press deadline, Nordic Aquafarms could not be reached for further comment on the hearings.
