New Jersey, the Diesel State
For people who worry about the health of the New Jersey Meadowlands, the giant tidal estuary that is the brackish heart of the Hudson-Raritan watershed, it was a complicated summer. During the FIFA World Cup, MetLife Stadium, built on what was once essentially an island in the middle of marshes, was described by organizers as being in a mythical-sounding land called “New York New Jersey.” Then, last month, five thousand gallons of diesel leaked from a Secaucus data center that nobody really knew was there into a creek just off the Hackensack River, and suddenly, as guys in hazmat suits swarmed the noxious water, it was back to seeing the Meadowlands as both properly in New Jersey and a dumping ground.
Even New Jersey’s environmental officials downplayed the spill’s impact. But not Bill Sheehan, the Hackensack Riverkeeper. “The people talking for the people who spilled the diesel are saying that none of it got out here in the river,” Sheehan said the other day, as he floated up the Hackensack on a thirty-foot pontoon boat. He was nearing some orange booms that blocked the entrance to Anderson Creek Marsh, at the mouth of the contaminated waterway. “I don’t know how that’s possible, since it took them something like fourteen hours to get these booms set up.”
It was nearly high tide, and Sheehan was taking two scientists out to perform water-quality readings. Born and raised in Secaucus, Sheehan, who is seventy-seven and founded the Hackensack Riverkeeper advocacy organization in 1997, was wearing a hoodie and aviators; his white hair and horseshoe mustache made his silver hoop earring read “pirate.” As the scientists readied their monitoring devices, Sheehan steered, cranking classic rock on the boat’s radio. The floating booms, to starboard, looked like flimsy protection against the spill. “I know data centers are suddenly the cause célèbre, or whatever,” he said. “But the damn thing was over there for twenty-five years and nobody cared, and nobody told me about the danger. I thought Data was a character on ‘Star Trek’!”
He headed upriver to the testing sites. The scientists ducked as the boat floated beneath a rusty drawbridge, completed in 1911 and designed by Joseph Strauss, the Golden Gate Bridge’s chief engineer. Picking up speed, Sheehan noted a fourteen-story hotel—windows all broken, rooms gutted. “It used to be the Crowne Plaza,” he said. “I busted them because I found out they were dumping raw sewage in the river three times a week. They pled guilty, and took the Crowne Plaza name off it.” Lately, he’s been hearing that it will be “a Class A hotel.” “We’ll see,” he said.
Sheehan steered north, past the American Dream mall, a liquid-natural-gas plant, ospreys and great-blue herons, the Moonachie and Bashes Creeks, Secaucus High School, the Mill Creek Marsh and park, a Bloomberg Radio tower, a power plant, and a tiny tugboat. Offshore from the Vince Lombardi Service Area, two fishermen were in a motorboat.
“Ahoy!” Sheehan shouted.
“Whatever you catch, don’t eat it!” one of the scientists added.
“In the seventies, there were maybe, like, half a dozen species of fish that could survive in here,” Sheehan said. “And now we’ve got well over seventy species, with striped bass up to thirty-five pounds being caught on a pretty regular basis.”
The radio played Zeppelin, Petty, and Bruce as the scientists took readings under a Route 46 bridge. The temperature and the dissolved-oxygen levels weren’t great, but they weren’t terrible; back at their labs, the scientists would test for nutrients and fecal bacteria. (The lower Hackensack is an E.P.A. Superfund site.) They tested under the Turnpike, near a Bergen County sewage-treatment plant, and then in Kingsland Marsh, a wide tidal wetland filled with delicate spartina grass, which marks good food and habitat for aquatic life of even the most microscopic kind. The marsh had the day’s best readings; being there felt like being on Cape Cod.
Back in Secaucus, Sheehan let the scientists off at a dock. He was frustrated with the newfound outrage over data centers, which he reckoned had more to do with utility bills than with larger water-quality concerns. He planned to urge the state to file a Natural Resource Damage claim, as it had in 1994, after a barge carrying more than three hundred thousand gallons of caustic-soda solution overturned. “That’s the active ingredient in Drano,” he said. Settlements for that spill—combined with settlements for groundwater chromium contamination and for an Exxon oil spill in the Arthur Kill—restored wetlands in Jersey City. A former dump got rehabilitated. “We also got a nine-hole public golf course, for people that want to shoot white balls around for no good reason, at the princely sum of about thirty dollars a round,” Sheehan said. “On the Hudson River side, they’ve got to pay half a million dollars to join those clubs. I call this one the People’s Golf Course.” ♦