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Many New Jersey Shore-area fishermen and lawmakers oppose the Obama administration's controversial new proposal to open an area off the Atlantic Coast to oil and gas drilling.

 

The areas being mulled are located more than 50 miles off the coast of Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia, which they said is too close to the swift Gulf Stream current.

 

"If there is any kind of spill it'll carry it up here. We're against it," said Roy Diehl, director of the Belford Seafood Cooperative and member of the Garden State Seafood Association's board of directors.

 

A worse-case scenario — an Atlantic Coast oil spill akin to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico — would threaten their billion-dollar commercial fishing industry, said Jim Lovgren, an association board member.

 

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