September 15 Nordic Aquafarms letter to The Free Press of midcoast Maine

 

To the Editor:

The incompetence of Nordic Aquafarms never ceases to amaze. This time Nordic's incompetence surfaced in a September 3 Republican Journal editorial entitled “Our News Coverage Is Not for Sale.” The editorial describes attempts by Nordic to extort more favorable Republican Journal coverage of its proposed $500 million industrial fish farm by threatening to stop advertising in the paper.

This is staggering incompetence for a corporation that wants to build $900 million of industrial fish farms in Maine and California.

But Nordic's remarkable incompetence extends well beyond its PR department. Indeed, there are many contestants in the Nordic Aquafarms incompetence derby.

There's Nordic's failure to adequately assess the subsoil at the site of its Fredrikstad, Norway plant, which has caused that plant to sink into the ground and has apparently forced Nordic to abandon the unit's commercial production in favor of much smaller-scale “research and training.” This after Nordic secured two government grants for the purpose of commercial production.

Astonishingly, Nordic then made the same mistake in Belfast, where Nordic now admits it would have to truck off more than a hundred truckloads of carbon-sequestering dirt in order to stabilize its proposed construction site.

Not satisfied with that colossal Fredrikstad blunder, Nordic then placed big, loud, industrial fans facing a residential neighborhood where plant neighbors were promised the Nordic plant would be “silent.” According to a plant neighbor I interviewed in late 2018, the fans, which violate local noise ordinances, could just as easily face the interior of the site's industrial park. But they don't, and now the fans have shattered the peace and quiet of Nordic's Fredrikstad neighbors and have ignited a war between Nordic and its Fredrikstad neighbors.

But my all-time favorite Nordic ineptitude is when Nordic discovered there is at a minimum considerable doubt over ownership of the intertidal land Nordic needs to cross with its Belfast saltwater intake and effluent discharge pipes. But rather than purchase the land and an adjoining home, which were for sale, Nordic decided to save a few bucks and attempted to hide its discovery from licensing authorities. And now, rather than owning a beautiful home where visiting and relocating company employees, contractors and guests could stay, Nordic has forked over to lawyers gargantuan sums of money to defend its questionable land claims and it has imperiled its own project.

Unfortunately, the same government licensing bodies Nordic tried to deceive – which are supposed to protect Maine citizens from corporate excess - have now begun to license Nordic and have thus begun to let loose this demonstrably incompetent corporation to wreak havoc on the midcoast.

Lawrence Reichard

Belfast 


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