opinion

Editorial: The Garden State is becoming the Pipeline State

Last week the New Jersey Pinelands Commission voted, 8-4 with one abstention, to approve an application to construct a natural gas pipeline through New Jersey’s treasured Pinelands, a dear and environmentally sensitive natural preserve in South Jersey. Perhaps not so coincidentally, Staff Writer Scott Fallon reported that a plan by a huge energy interest to build a half-mile natural gas pipeline in the Meadowlands was recently submitted to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

That commission, FERC, has made it a habit in recent years of approving several such pipelines to carry fracked gas from Pennsylvania through New Jersey. One of those pipelines, built through a protected area of the Highlands preserve, has been particularly upsetting to residents and environmentalists.

Add it all up, and these developments, on the whole, represent the emergence of a disturbing trend: New Jersey is transforming from the Garden State into the Pipeline State.

It is, perhaps, past time to push the pause button on all these pipeline projects and consider the very real hazards they represent. The new pipeline project in the Meadowlands, proposed by Oklahoma-based energy giant Williams, would upgrade more than 10 miles of pipeline through Bergen County to allow about 10 percent more gas to be pumped to northeastern customers for heat and electricity generation. The work would include the placement of a new 42-inch pipeline parallel to two existing pipes that already run along Metro Road in Carlstadt.

Bill Sheehan, executive director of the Hackensack Riverkeeper, said the Williams project is being built too close to protected wetlands, marshes which have, after years of rehabilitation and cleanup, begun to make a comeback following decades of industrial pollution and commercial environmental abuse. As The Record has reported, the wetlands are now cleaner, and starting to once more attract a greater number of wildlife species back to the area.

“Construction is going to make a mess out of the whole area,” Sheehan told The Record. “The trench is 40 feet wide because of all the wet soil that could cave in. it’s going to be a real mess ecologically.”

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Certainly, natural gas pipeline projects hold a degree of economic value, chiefly in the form of temporary construction jobs, but the potential damage to sensitive environmental areas is of grave concern. Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, warns of a threat to drinking water from another part of the Williams project, a valve replacement that is scheduled near the Oradell Reservoir.

Meantime, the 28-mile pipeline project now green-lighted to run through the Pinelands and part of the legendary Pine Barrens, represents nothing less than an assault on the natural beauty of one of New Jersey’s cherished gems. The project, known as the southern reliability link, will run through three counties, and also cut through the Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst.

Project supporters of the so-called New Jersey Natural Gas project say the pipeline will provide a backup source of natural gas to more than 1 million people. That may be, but at what cost to an ecological miracle described by the Pinelands Preservation Alliance as “a globally unique ecosystem” that is home to oak, pine, and cedar trees, a multitude of rare plant species, and assorted wild animals.

The Legislature recently passed a law designating “Garden State” as New Jersey’s state slogan. The state’s top elected and appointed officials need to ask themselves whether that designation is still valid. Or whether, seeing potential energy-related profits at every turn, New Jersey would rather be known as the Pipeline State.