Environmentalists rejoice as life returns to Hackensack River and Meadowlands
The tidal surge from the Hackensack River that inundated Moonachie and Little Ferry last week demonstrated some of the unintended consequences of decades of development in the Meadowlands. The loss of hundreds of acres of natural habitat was partly responsible for leaving low-lying towns in the marshlands vulnerable to Hurricane Sandy.
But there is another narrative about the river, one obscured by the catastrophic damage produced by the storm. A river that was slowly dying for much of the second half of the 20th century has been quietly making a comeback, first in small steps and now in more conspicuous increments.
On a recent afternoon not long before the storm, three wildlife photographers stood at the peak of what was once among the larger landfills in Bergen County, peering into the cloudy sky.
There, above the distinctly North Jersey tableau of MetLife Stadium, the swampy marshland surrounding the Hackensack River and the distant Manhattan skyscrapers, hovered a smattering of silhouettes that for decades had been considered a rare sighting in this region. On this day, they were everywhere.
"One, two, three," said Ron Shields, the principal of Harrison High School, as he squinted through his telephoto lens. The birds, called kestrels, a type of falcon on the state's threatened species list, were shrieking over the muted traffic noise from nearby Route 3.
"Four, five, six," Shields continued. "At least six. Six kestrels. Boy. This land here, it almost looks like a park."
For many decades, the sighting would have been rare and Shields' description of the terrain would have sounded absurd. But they are among many indications that the massive effort to restore the Meadowlands and the Hackensack River is working.
People have been talking about a rebound of the river and its surrounding habitats for a long time, but signs of progress used to be measured in tiny steps: A new patch of nutrient-rich meadow grass. The hatching of a single marsh hawk. A striped bass on a fisherman's line.
Now, it's not just the kestrels on the Kingsland landfill that are coming back in swarms. More than 280 species of birds are routinely spotted in the region, including 34 on the state's lists of species that are endangered, threatened and of special concern. There has been a threefold increase in aquatic worms living in the mucky river bottom, a foundation for the food chain. Barnacles, water-filtering crustaceans once unable to survive in the polluted water, cover pilings and irritate boaters, who must regularly scrape the husks from their hulls.
"It's better than it's been in the past 50 years," said Bill Sheehan, the founder and executive director of The Hackensack Riverkeeper, an advocacy group. "Maybe the past 100 years."
The photographers were part of an experimental bird-watching expedition, organized by the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission, to the top of the Kingsland landfill, an area generally closed to the public.
Their destination was one of the garbage dumps that covered 2,000 acres along the lower Hackensack River and its surrounding land for much of the past century. Throughout the 1960s, '70s and '80s, the dumps, along with the other insults North Jersey's communities bestowed on the region's prime waterway, threatened to snuff out hundreds of species of birds, fish and other wildlife that once thrived here.
The trash heaps occasionally caught fire and sometimes burned for years — one in Jersey City smoldered for 30 years before it was put out — and engulfed the region with an acrid smell that truckers would joke about on their radios as they passed through on their way to New York City.
The dumps were part of a massive drive to fill in and develop the Hackensack marshlands. The loss of significant parts of the Meadowlands had consequences last week for people in Moonachie and Little Ferry when the hurricane's tidal surge sent the river over flood controls into homes and businesses, the latest of what have become almost annual floods along the river.
While the exact cause of the flooding has not been determined, development in the Meadowlands certainly contributed, by diminishing the amount of vacant land to absorb excess water. In the mid-1980s, on a busy weekday, 400 garbage trucks brought loads to the Kingsland landfill. These days, however, the site looks, in the words of one Meadowlands Commission employee, like Ireland. The enormous mound is now covered in Technicolor-green grass and punctured with dozens of black pipes, part of a methane-collection system, that protrude like straws from an ice cream float. The methane, a greenhouse gas, is burned off or converted to electricity, keeping it from displacing oxygen at the soil level and allowing vegetation to grow. The system also has an unforeseen benefit: Kestrels, the size of mourning doves, like to perch on the pipes as they survey the landscape for their prey.
A reminder of the recent past, a sulfuric stench rises on the wind and alternates with sweet wafts of freshly mown grass. But now the smell is welcome, the product of millions of microorganisms at work beneath the surface decomposing the trash. It is a sign of success.
"You smell what I smell?" said Shields, a wiry, white-haired devotee of the region whose speech is punctuated by phrases like "boy!" and "that's the nuts!"
"That's perfume," he said.