With the pile-driving of massive wind-farm foundations fully underway, Empire Wind developer Equinor this week said it’s enacted a list of measures to ensure sea mammals and other aquatic life aren’t harmed.

At least six of the foundation structures were in place when Newsday approached the construction site 14 miles off Long Beach Tuesday and the company said it’s completing one new foundation about every two days or less.

The foundation work will continue through at least next October, and wind towers and turbines, reaching heights of 951 feet tall, would be installed next summer, with the project expecting to be producing its first energy by year's end.

Pile-driving, which includes thousands of blows to drive each foundation structure up to 180 feet into the seabed, according to federal filings, is considered one of the elements of the offshore construction for Empire Wind that can cause "harassment" of sea life.

Paperwork filed by Equinor says the maximum number of blows by the hydraulic hammer is 40 per minute, with each foundation expected to require 4,000 to 7,000 blows to fully set the foundation in the seabed. Companies are required to take a series of steps to limit the impacts.

It’s not just the main installation vessel, the Thialf, that can cause potential impacts. The project has more than a dozen support ships in the area of the work. They include a heavy-lift vessel and a fall pipe vessel to lay rock, an anchor handling tug, a bubble curtain vessel to reduce noise impacts, a crew transfer vessel, a protected species observer vessel, a passive acoustic monitoring/sound field verification vessel and local "fishing and scout" vessels, Equinor said.

The ships must restrict their speed to no more than 11.5 miles per hour in the work areas, and every vessel working on the project must have a designated visual observer "on duty at all times" to look for sea life and monitor speed compliance, Equinor said.

Empire is restricted from any pile-driving activities from January through April, a rule in place to ensure the potentially harmful effects don’t occur when North Atlantic right whales could migrate through the area. Crews are also restricted from pile-driving at night.

Pile-driving work must stop if crews or equipment detect marine mammals within a 1.2-mile clearance zone until the animal departs the zone. At least six visual observers with high-power binoculars monitor the surface, while underwater hydrophones monitor the entire construction area, with a 6.2 mile acoustic monitoring zone in place. At least three observers are on the main pile-driving Thialf.

A right whale seen at any distance triggers a shutdown of work, Equinor said, while other sea mammals such as dolphins have a shutdown zone of just under a mile. There are six infrared cameras equipped with special image-recognition software on board the Thialf to help detect sea mammals, and acoustic monitoring with underwater microphones to identify "vocalizing" mammals. There’s also "sound-field verification" buoys to monitor pile-driving noise, Equinor said.

A special vessel around the pile-driving works helps lower noise impacts through a double curtain of air bubbles to absorb and deflect sound, the company said. Work commences each day with "soft-starts" at lesser noise levels to let mammals escape the area before the heavier hammering begins.