By Steve Strunsky | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Richard Isaksen has been clamming and crabbing in Raritan Bay and fishing lower New York Bay for 50 of his 63 years. It’s a hard life, but it’s the only one he knows, and all he wants for himself and his fellow fishermen is to be able to keep plying those waters.
“We ain’t asking for nothing,” said Isaksen, of Middletown, who’s the skipper of the 65-foot fishing boat Isaetta and president of the Belford Seafood Coop in Monmouth County. “We just want to make a living.”
But that could much tougher, Isaksen said, if state regulators join federal counterparts in approving the so-called Raritan Loop, a 23-mile underwater natural gas pipeline that would run along the sea floor across Raritan Bay and Lower New York Bay to Brooklyn.
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Editor’s Note: As the New Jerseyans were opposing the pipeline, an opposite lobbying effort was taking place on the New York side of the bay. Grid steps up pressure for undersea pipeline approval
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“They’re going to interrupt everything in the bay,” said Isaaksen, whose Monmouth County fishing cooperative belongs to a coalition of environmentalists, fishermen and elected officials opposed to the project. “They’re going to rip up the clam beds. They’re going to destroy the crab beds where the crabs bed down. And then it goes out to Brooklyn, south of the Rockaways, right? That’s where we do our fluke fishing.”
The Williams Companies, Inc., a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based company, has already been granted permits by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for the Raritan loop, part of Williams’ Northeast Supply Enhancement project, a $1 billion expansion of the 10,000-mile Transco Pipeline network stretching from Texas to New York.
The Raritan Loop is a 26-inch pipeline that would form a loop with an existing gas pipeline, built in 1951 and operating at capacity, that also stretches across the Raritan and New York bays. The existing pipeline was meant to serve a much smaller market.
A Williams spokesman, Chris Stockton, said the new stretch of the pipeline would serve a dual function: provide redundancy, or “reliability,” for the existing 1.8 million gas users in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and other parts of Long Island; and increase capacity to that market, which is expanding through new development and through some 8,000 customers converting each year from oil heat to natural gas.
Stockton added any disruption to shellfish beds or fisheries would be temporary.
Following completion of a final environmental impact study by Williams, FERC issued a finding on Jan. 25 that the project would not have a significant environmental impact, though the agency did conclude that it “may affect, and is likely to adversely affect, right whale, fin whale, and Atlantic sturgeon.”
The project still needs approvals from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which is now weighing its decision following a public hearing on March 18 in East Brunswick.
The coalition has asked the DEP to hold another public hearing, this time somewhere along the Raritan Bayfront, and to extend the comment period, now set to expire April 17, in order to let those most impacted by the project voice their concerns. Asked Tuesday whether it would grant those requests, the DEP said no.
“DEP has held two public hearings on this, including one last week,” a DEP spokesman Larry Hajna said in an email. “The DEP is under a statutory deadline to render a decision by (around) May 19. As part of its review, the DEP will consider public comments received both in writing and during the public hearings.”
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