Marina's license held up over safety concerns
Beverly Fire Department said Beverly Port Marina's fuel system posed 'high risk'
A flammable storage license for the city’s largest marina is being held up due to what the Beverly Fire Department has called a “high risk for hazardous flammable vapors and/or a major fuel leak.”
The City Council was scheduled to vote last week on the license for Beverly Port Marina, but the application was withdrawn from the agenda upon the advice of the city solicitor, according to the City Clerk’s office.
The fire department has been expressing concerns over the safety of Port Marina’s fueling system since firefighters responded to two fuels leaks in 2023 and 2024. In a letter to Beverly Port Marina owner Frank Kinzie last October, Beverly Fire Department Capt. Jacob Kreyling wrote that “the risk of flammable fuel vapors in and under your docks and surrounding your fuel delivery system is unacceptable.”
“Our Department cannot continue to permit your marine fuel facility in its current condition and infrastructure which has proven to repeatedly and unpredictably leak and weep, supporting conditions for fuel leaks and flammable vapors to be present,” Kreyling wrote.
Beverly Port Marina is the marina with the big red boat storage building on Water Street, near the Beverly-Salem bridge. It hosts 300 boats in the summer, making it one of the largest recreational marine facilities in Massachusetts, according to Marina Life.
According to Kreyling’s letter, the Fire Department responded to a fuel release at Port Marina in August of 2023. The department required the marina to get a third-party inspection of the system and said the system should be upgraded and replaced “as soon a possible, ideally when the 2023 boating season ends.”
Kreyling said Kinzie indicated at the time that he intended to perform the replacement work over the winter of 2023-24, but it was not done. Firefighters then responded to another fuel leak in June of 2024.
Kreyling said his letter was “official notification” for Port Marina to take action to replace the marine fuel delivery lines as a condition of its 2025 marine fueling permit.
Kreyling said representatives from the Department of Fire Services, Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, and U.S. Coast Guard all support the fire department’s action.
According to the letter, Kinzie told the fire department that other marinas in the area are not being forced to replace their aging systems, but Kreyling wrote that “those sites are not experiencing similar leak issues.”
Kinzie told The Beverly Beat on Wednesday that he disagrees with the Fire Department’s characterization of the fuel delivery system as unsafe. But he said the issue is “moot” because Beverly Port Marina is in the process of replacing the parts of the fuel system that the letter references, and that the fuel pipes are currently drained and empty and awaiting replacement.
Kinzie said the marina is planning to open its fuel system “in the next few weeks.”
Beverly Fire Chief Pete O’Connor told The Beverly Beat that the fire department is working with Beverly Port Marina “to make sure that their fuel dispensing system is up to date so we do not have any environmental or other issues.”
“We have had some leaks over the past couple years and want to make sure that is mitigated before the boating season,” O’Connor said.