Tanisha Garner, a resident of Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood, is raising her three daughters in an apartment building steps from the Passaic River, the environmentally damaged river that looks like the neck and right shoulder of New Jersey’s largest city on a map.
She knows Newark keeps trying to come back from decades of environmental degradation. But when Garner stares at the river yards from her front door, she wonders whether people should live by the Passaic at all, especially when it floods.
“When it rains hard around here, the water accumulates, the flooding goes up against the infrastructure, the water is not properly drained, so there are areas of the Ironbound where you need a boat,” Garner said. “It smells like garbage, sewage, and fish. It’s so much that you can’t always pinpoint what kind of odor it is, except that it definitely comes from the river.”
While the Passaic River has always come through Newark, it is now going to come increasingly higher and heavier. The effects of climate change mean more extreme and unpredictable weather, as well as an inevitably rising tide in coastal and riparian areas such as Newark, the effects of which were seen by the damage done by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and Tropical Storm Ida in 2021.
According to the New Jersey Climate Change Resource Center at Rutgers University, New Jersey will experience a sea level rise of up to one foot between 2000 and 2030, up to 2 feet by 2050, and up to four feet by 2100. In a scenario where New Jersey does not meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and there is little action to reduce fossil fuel emissions, New Jersey could see sea level rise of over 6 feet by 2100. The result would be that large parts of Newark would be underwater, particularly the already low-lying parts of the Ironbound.
As the water rises and the weather intensifies, one constant fact throughout is climate change will have even greater import: what goes in the Passaic River will come back out into Newark, including the streets and homes of local residents. As the number of homes continues to grow as the pace of redevelopment increases, environmental activist Jeff Tittel warned what the price of extensive building could be.
“As the bays are rising and if you get a heavy storm, the water that would be coming down the mountains that would flow through Newark into the bay won’t flow through Newark anymore. It’s going to flow into Newark,” said Tittel, the former director of the New Jersey Sierra Club. “The weight of all of these buildings will also cause the meadow lands that were filled in for construction to sink, and the water will seek its own level. Put this all together, and it’s a recipe for disaster.”
Riverkeeper sees Passaic as liability to development, not opportunity
Captain Bill Sheehan has spent decades monitoring the environmental health of the waterways that flow through the North Jersey conurbation.
The head of the Hackensack Riverkeeper nonprofit organization, he spearheaded the resurrection of the Hackensack River and the Meadowlands estuary in part by slowly winning the battle of perception. Sheehan regularly takes people out on his boat to see the Hackensack up close, and rents canoes out to the community so they can propel themselves into a unique urban wilderness where the New York City skyline and New Jersey Turnpike frame the beauty of the Meadowlands.
When people see egrets, herons, cormorants, gulls, fish, and other wildlife thriving despite years of pollution and industrial abuse, he wins allies for the legal battles against polluters and governments not inclined to promote better water quality and a cleaner environment. A successful volunteer cleanup program adds to the positive public pressure to protect the river, a visual reminder that the waterway is indeed worth saving. Seeing is believing.
A morning trip from the Hackensack Riverkeeper boat launch in Secaucus south toward Kearny showcases the river’s fundamental landscape duality. Sheehan piloted his boat underneath the man-made majesty of the Pulaski Skyway, the 1930s-built steel tie that binds Newark and Jersey City and soars over the Hackensack and Passaic rivers. At the same time, a flock of geese soared overhead, looking down on great blue herons dipping their heads into the marshy banks of the Hackensack, hunting their self-service breakfast.
But when the boat turns north around Kearny Point and enters the Passaic River, an almost immediate hit of methane fumes invades the nostrils. The Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission plant sits at that point, abutting the river in the Ironbound. The part of the plant facing the river features a set of swinging, rolling doors that are supposed to stop the river from coming into parts of Newark as it did during Hurricane Sandy.
Sheehan looked at the doors and shook his head.
“You can’t build things like vertical walls along the length of the river to keep the river out. It’s just as much of a fantasy as building a border wall,” Sheehan said. “Whether it’s during a storm or an extreme high tide, there’s all kinds of exposure here. You can try to make something resilient to deal with the day-to-day phenomenon. But now, with the type of intense weather we’re getting, they’ve got to know that eventually it’s going to fail. The river’s going to go where the river wants to go when it wants to go there.”
Going further up the Passaic River in Newark becomes a trip that rivals “Apocalypse Now,” Jersey-style. It is a voyage deep into the heart of post-industrial darkness, a tour of the environmental war the Garden State waged upon itself for decades.
One of the most infamous sights on this stretch of the Passaic is the site of the Diamond Alkali plant, which produced Agent Orange, an herbicide used by the U.S. military in the Vietnam War to eradicate dense vegetation. The factory dumped dioxin, a highly toxic chemical byproduct and carcinogen linked to reproductive and developmental problems in humans, into the Passaic and onto the Ironbound’s streets. In the 1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency named the former Diamond Alkali plant as a Superfund site, requiring substantial and expensive cleanup of the remaining hazardous waste. The factory was demolished and buried, and the poisoned property was capped more than two decades ago with concrete and gravel. However, the planned remediation of the former Diamond Alkali chemical plant site, including a 17-mile stretch along the lower Passaic River, has no confirmed completion date.
The site, dusty and brownish-gray, now sits as silent as a tomb, a chain link fence on top of a flood wall the only visible barrier between it and the Passaic. Climate change and extreme weather events pose a high risk of stirring up the toxins present, including those settled into the sediment on the river bottom. However, Sheehan feels that any sense of urgency to finish the cleanup job is unheeded.
“This is still a liability. They didn’t clean it up enough to make it an asset. It will never be an asset,” Sheehan said. “It’s going to be here for thousands of years.”
While dioxin in the river is an invisible killer, other items that can clearly be seen in the river remind any observer why any rush of Passaic River water onto their streets or into their homes would leave a nasty mark. A dead pigeon, its outstretched wings stilled forever, swirling in what looks like black mayonnaise. Decaying tree trunks. Rotting spare tires. An empty two-liter plastic vodka bottle. A rusting anti-freeze can. All the human detritus that one can imagine is in the river, looking for a home, and having none, stays there.
There is an overarching plan in place to deal with river debris through the combined sewer overflow system. According to the EPA, most U.S. communities today have separate sanitary sewer systems. In this type of system, one set of pipes collects wastewater from homes and businesses and carries it to a wastewater treatment plant through sanitary sewers. A separate set of pipes collects stormwater from drains at the end of driveways, around parking lots, and along streets and carries it to a local waterway.
In a combined sewer system, wastewater and stormwater both flow through the same pipes. In dry weather, all wastewater flows to a wastewater treatment plant where it is treated before being discharged to a waterbody. But during wet weather, stormwater also enters the system. The combined flow of wastewater and stormwater can overwhelm the system. Permitted outfalls are located throughout the system to act as relief points during wet weather, but these outfalls discharge untreated or partially treated stormwater and wastewater into nearby bodies of water. These discharges, known as combined sewer overflows, contain the type of hazardous debris and bacteria harmful to people, pets, and wildlife and that is already visible in the Passaic, hence the stench when a hard rain falls.
There is evidence of the combined sewer overflow system also on the banks of the Passaic on the Newark side. One outflow portal can be seen in front of McCarter Highway with the expanding Newark skyline behind it as new construction and development is also visible. A steady yellowish-brown trickle enters the river even though the sun is shining. Further up the river under the Clay Street bridge on the Newark side, another combined sewer overflow exit portal surrounded by more plant and man made debris and pollution gives the river water a dark viscous quality.
Looking over at the construction equipment, Sheehan wondered aloud what its purpose was.
“Riverfront property is considered to be valuable, but we’ve got to stop people thinking that. Riverfront property is a liability because of what’s happening with the weather,” Sheehan said. “They’re got to fix the river first. Contaminated water comes, deposits contamination, and then it goes. So, what do you want? Do you want contaminated water going in, or do you want clean water? Because no matter what, the water is coming.”
Residents concerned as new construction pushes to the Passaic
In the early 1800s, people came to the banks of the Passaic for a range of reasons, such as bathing, drinking, and transport. Then, as the Industrial Revolution took hold, the Passaic’s banks boomed when factories lined the river and business blossomed. This economic growth drew the population that made Newark famous as the state’s largest city, and ultimately created the pollution that made the Passaic infamous, a foul stream of post-industrial toxicity.
Now, the city’s redevelopment is pushing more people to the river’s banks, including in the Ironbound, where the naked eye can’t help but see new construction. Development to the already dense neighborhood of approximately 55,000 people is gathering intensity. New apartment buildings and condos are increasingly dotting the landscape of the largely working-class, immigrant-occupied neighborhood, with construction sites fitting in between the restaurants, bakeries, and two-family homes the closely-knit community is known for. A proposed development on the 2.5 acre site at the former Iberia restaurant framed by Jefferson and Market streets would build two 26-story and two 30-story buildings, creating 1,400 apartments next to the Passaic River.
Local residents expressed concerns about the proposed high-rise project at a recent public meeting at the Sport Club Português. Among those in attendance was Manny Lopes, owner of Lopes & Sons Hardware Inc. on Ferry Street, who is also the president of the Ironbound Business Improvement District.
“When it rains, you don’t have to see much to have water up on the sidewalk. The infrastructure, the sewer, it’s old. And when you get further away from Ferry Street, forget about it. People have to leave their cars in the middle of the water. Flooding is a problem all over the neighborhood,” Lopes said while he helped a customer buy a plunger. “And it’s not only Newark. On the other side of the river in Harrison, I was driving home when it was raining really hard. I was talking to my wife, and all of a sudden I was in the middle of freaking swamp water. All these buildings here are going to be new, but the sewer will be the same. I don’t think people are going to be ready. The Ironbound is already overpopulated, it’s full. To handle whatever comes, we have to produce new infrastructure. We have to think.”
At Riverfront Park, located alongside the Passaic in the Ironbound, longtime resident John Goldstein pointed to the rising river when he spoke about the future.
“They’ve got to come up with a flooding plan and stick to it. You get spot zoning for a specific development that winds up undermining the master plan, and changes get made without enough public engagement,” Goldstein said. “Someone is making decisions about this land, and I feel like it’s our land. We’re paying for infrastructure. We’re stakeholders. We shouldn’t have to beg for a seat at the table. We should be part of the discussion.”
There are some significant local efforts to improve stormwater infrastructure. The City of Newark’s Department of Water & Sewer Utilities has rolled out an initiative called RainReady Newark designed to increase the city’s resilience to stormwater. The program plans to use natural processes to capture, filter, and absorb rainwater. For example, a rain garden has been built at the intersection of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. and Central Avenue near the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers-Newark that includes highly absorbent plants and grass that will soak up excess rainwater and prevent or slow it down from flowing into the rest of downtown Newark.
Other proposed stormwater infrastructure plans include a project along eastern Ferry Street in the Ironbound in the direction of Kearny and Jersey City. The plan includes an enhanced amount of trees, as well as stormwater planters and porous concrete panels designed to absorb stormwater and reduce runoff. Dozens of potential project sites have been earmarked for the Ironbound.
At a recent community meeting held by the city at the Urban League of Essex County in Newark’s Central Ward to promote the RainReady Newark initiative, Kim Gaddy, founder and director of the South Ward Environmental Alliance, expressed hope that the plan would work.
“This work is truly important, and we need community voices to be heard. We’ve been fighting for green infrastructure for years,” Gaddy said. “We know the hotspots where flooding happens. I’ve seen fish swimming up out of the lake at Weequahic Park and down Meeker Avenue. These are the kind of plans we need.”
However, while the city is coming up with a framework to deal with the effects of stormwater on land, officials seemed less certain about how to deal with the stormwater threat coming from the increasingly rising Passaic River, swollen by progressively extreme weather.
“Climate change is real. You’re never going to beat Mother Nature. We’re working with the Army Corps of Engineers right now to put a flood wall up in the East Ward,” said Kareem Adeem, director of the City of Newark’s Department of Water and Sewer Utilities, referencing the city ward that consists mostly of the Ironbound. “The East Ward used to be marshland, and overdevelopment is real. But the water that comes in when its flooding is the rainwater in some areas of the East Ward that has combined sewers. And when the system is running full, the water comes back out onto the street.”
“We’re built a retention system so that we can store stormwater underground then release it slowly,” Adeem added. “Again, I don’t think we can beat Mother Nature, but we can mitigate flooding. Green infrastructure is not the only answer, but it’s one of the answers to help us.”
Back outside of her Ironbound apartment building yards away from the Passaic River when she’s raising her family, Tanisha Garner can’t get help soon enough, especially as the neighborhood population grows.
“Before we keep building in Newark, why don’t we put more infrastructure in place for the future? They say they’re trying to deal with the flooding now. But it’s not just the river overflowing into the community. It’s the community overflowing into the river. Build on something solid before you build more. We’ve got to do a better job, and it’s going to take all of us to do it.”
This story was produced as part of the Northern New Jersey Media Collaborative Project “Stormwater Matters,” a project focusing on stormwater management solutions in the state.
