Fish And Wildlife Wants To Dismantle Old AT And T Poles, Antennas At Good Luck Point And Manahawkin

by Patricia A. Miller

The wooden poles and long-unused antennas that jut out of the tidal marshlands near Good Luck Point off Bayview Avenue and the old brick AT&T building are a familiar sight to many in Ocean County.

Decades ago, the poles, lofty metal antennas and wires and the brick transmitter building were a major, state-of-the-art communications center on the Jersey Shore. The facilities were a high-frequency, shortwave radio transmitting station providing telephone high-seas service to ships at seas and to overseas locations under the call sign WOO, according to www.long-lines.net.

Now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to remove roughly 340 poles and towers of the huge rhombic antennas that lie rusting in the marsh grass. The acres of marshlands are now part of the Edwin F. Forsythe Wildlife Refuge, home to egrets, ospreys herons and even bald eagles.

The project will be funded by the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013 and will enhance the salt marshes, according to the federal Fish and Wildlife website.

“Hundreds of poles are to be removed, in addition to cables, wires, metal towers, and concrete blocks,“ the website states. “The goal of this action is to enhance coastal marsh habitats by increasing marsh resiliency from impacts of storm events and other ecosystem stressors.”

Berkeley Township bought the building for a dollar years ago, during another administration. The township still owns the building, which was in a state of disrepair even before Superstorm Sandy roared on shore in October. 2012.

“This location of the stations almost literally at high water mark was due to the fact that these experiments had demonstrated in a striking way the attenuation of signals travelling over an intervening trip of land between the station and the ocean,” according to an article written by Fred Bunnell in 1940, now on www.mysite.verizon.net.

AT&T removed the wires connecting the utility poles before the Good Luck Point property became a National Wildlife Refuge area.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife is also proposing to remove 113 poles and several antennas from the WOO companion site in Stafford Township. The entire Stafford property is a conservation easement to the wildlife service, which does not own the building, the website states.

Both properties are eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

“Because both of the historic properties represent well-preserved examples of nationally significant shortwave facilities, they have been determined eligible for National Register listing, according to the Fish and Wildlife website. ”Consequently, the proposed removal of poles from the antenna fields will cause an adverse effect under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act.”

A mitigation program is being developed in consultation with the New Jersey State Historic Preservation Office, the site states.

The shortwave facility at Good Luck Point was a renowned transmitting station, which helped broadcast Voice of America around the globe after 1944 and enabled communication with ships at sea throughout the twentieth century.

Photo credits: Patricia A. Miller