By Sunayana Prabhu
RUMSON – Neighbors may have gotten an unpleasant whiff or two after a sewer pipe broke in the borough, creating a messy situation at the east end of Grant Avenue May 7. Officials from the borough’s engineering and public works departments responded to reports of a leak at the pump station across the Shrewsbury River from Sea Bright.
The cause of the failure is not yet known but David Mark, the Rumson Borough engineer, floodplain manager and interim zoning officer, said the pipe was installed in the mid-to late-1960s, when the sewers were first installed in Rumson. The thinking is the pipe deteriorated “just due to age,” he said. “We are still evaluating the pipe segments for the cause of failure.”
Mark explained how sewage or wastewater flows from homes and buildings from the entire borough to the pump station and is then “pumped from that pump station on Grant Avenue under the Shrewsbury River into Sea Bright. It then joins with Sea Bright sewers,” he said, through a pipe “that the Borough of Sea Bright and the Borough of Rumson jointly own in Ocean Avenue, and then it goes to Monmouth Beach where it’s then treated by the Two Rivers Water Reclamation Authority.”
A busted hollow piece of metal can be far more draining than one might expect.
“This was a difficult project,” Mark said. “Unlike other utilities, which can be shut off, I can’t turn off the sewage system.”
He said sewage lines cannot be controlled like water lines. So, “we have to manage that continuous flow of sewage and account for it,” Mark said, explaining that the borough dispatched multiple 5,000-gallon tanker trucks to vacuum the sewage out of the sewer system and move it beyond the leak to the connection with Sea Bright.
“It was a significant effort,” he said especially because of the close proximity to homes. “We had to be careful that we weren’t negatively impacting anybody, or at least try to minimize the impact to the residents.”
With any pipe break on the peninsula comes the danger of wastewater entering Two River waterways.
“I would say we had little to no sewage going into the rivers,” Mark said, recalling the combined efforts of multiple departments that responded to the pipe break.
“Our department of public works really came and rose to the challenge. We had a significant number of resources committed to this and the governing body of Rumson Council and mayor were very supportive of all of us to get the job done,” he said.
“It was a collaborative effort and everybody came together to get the job done quickly.”
The borough hired licensed public utility contractor Precise Construction for the emergency work. Through Wednesday, May 10, borough departments, along with utility contractors and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP), worked together to resolve the issue while following protocols for the safety of workers, residents and the environment.
The borough often coordinates with field agents from the NJDEP to perform routine monitoring and testing, Mark said. “Our sanitary sewer system and our stormwater system, the drainage system is all permitted under the NJDEP, so we always have some level of NJDEP oversight with our operation.”
While the main break “is currently resolved,” Mark said borough officials will continue to have discussions with the NJDEP since the pipe is old.
“We need to be thinking about the life expectancy of the system and putting a new pipe in play for future generations,” he said.
The article originally appeared in the May 18 – 24, 2023 print edition of The Two River Times.
