A wind farm forum in Newport, Rhode Island, got a bit heated last week when a man stepped in as attendees expressed concerns about offshore wind turbine structures, one of which recently collapsed, leaving debris in the ocean.
Video shared on Facebook by the Newport Police Department shows a woman wearing gloves standing in front of a crowd, holding a piece of fiberglass that reportedly washed up on shore from a damaged turbine.
As she was showing her items, a man approached and grabbed her bag, as well as a flat box containing other items, before walking away with the bag, throwing it on the ground and returning to his seat.
Voices from the crowd could be heard chanting, “Amazing” and “This is democracy.”
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Police in Newport, Rhode Island released a video of a man interrupting people as they spoke at a public hearing about wind turbines. (Newport Police Department)
The same man is then seen rising from his chair again, holding what appears to be an index card, and leaning towards the same woman, who is still speaking.
When the woman refused to take the card, the man reached for the piece of fiberglass she was holding, but when he couldn’t reach it, he inserted the index card between the frame of the woman’s glasses and her face.
“Excuse me,” someone in the crowd can be heard saying.
In another video clip, as another woman stood at the podium to speak, a man walked up, snatched her microphone, unplugged it and placed it behind a speaker panel at the front of the room.
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Police in Newport, Rhode Island released a video of a man interrupting people while they were speaking at a wind turbine forum. (Newport Police Department)
A video of the Newport Energy and Environmental Committee hearing showed a slide listing as panelists state Sen. Dawn Oyer, Brown University professor Steven Poder and Save the Bay executive director Topher Hamblett.
At the end of the video shared by police, one of the panellists can be heard saying to one of the women, “You guys delayed us by 30 minutes after your rant and now you’re going home early?”
The video was removed from the police department’s Facebook page on Wednesday. Police told Fox News Digital that the man seen in the video has been identified, but no arrests have been made.
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Police in Newport, Rhode Island released a video of a man interrupting people while they were speaking at a wind turbine forum. (Newport Police Department)
Asked if charges might be filed against the man, police said they had no further information to add because the investigation is ongoing.
Local blog Newport Buzz reported the changes to the site came less than 12 hours after a man who attended the meeting discovered he was “featured prominently” on U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s campaign website.
A current photo on the senator’s campaign website shows Whitehouse shaking hands with a woman, but the Internet Archive has a different photo.
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Snapshots taken at the senator’s campaign site on Wednesday show Whitehouse fist-bumping with a woman wearing a helmet and a person standing behind the senator, also wearing a helmet. Three people in the photo were not wearing helmets, including Whitehouse and a man at the meeting who was looking at the camera.
A photo removed from the campaign website of Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse shows a man believed to be involved in the incident during a wind turbine forum in Newport, Rhode Island, last week. (Senator Whitehouse’s campaign website)
Fox News Digital has reached out to Senator Whitehouse’s office for more information about why the image was replaced and what the man’s relationship to the senator is. Senator Whitehouse’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Large pieces of damaged wind turbine blades from Vineyard Wind continued to wash up on shore on Nantucket’s south coast last month.
Vineyard Wind said in a statement that blades were damaged and hundreds of pieces of debris, both large and small, had washed up and cleanup operations were underway on the island’s southern beaches.
Nantucket’s harbormaster closed all beaches on the south shore because of the debris, but people were allowed to walk there with caution.
Vineyard Wind is a joint venture between Avangrid, a foreign company that built the wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts, and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. The company is a beneficiary of the Biden-Harris Administration’s signature domestic policy achievement, the Inflation Control Act (IRA).
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In October, Vineyard Wind bragged that it had closed a $1.2 billion “first-of-its-kind tax incentive package” for commercial-scale offshore wind with three U.S.-based banks, calling it “the largest single-asset tax-advantaged loan and the first for a commercial-scale offshore wind project.”
Vineyard Wind 1 is scheduled to begin on-site construction in late 2021 with completion of the nation’s first offshore substation in July 2023. Located 15 miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, the 800 MW project will be the first commercial-scale offshore wind project in the United States.
FOX Weather contributed to this report.
