Imagine being given two minutes to grab your worldly possessions before a building inspector slaps a sign on your home of 32 years saying it is uninhabitable.
Barbara Fox-Cooper doesn’t have to imagine. It happened to her Friday morning after a gas pipeline drilling mishap appears to have fractured the foundation of her home in a rural, bucolic stretch of Upper Freehold, Monmouth County.
“They gave me two minutes to grab my belongings while they stood in the doorway to make sure my home didn’t collapse,” Fox-Cooper said Sunday. “My heart is literally crushed.”
She said she heard a cracking sound Friday morning and spotted water gushing up from the floor of her concrete basement.
“It sounded like a cracker being crushed,” she said.
A neighbor helped her figure out the foundation was crumbling and it appeared to have been caused by a hydraulic drilling operation for a gas pipeline about 100 feet from her property.
The incident occurred Friday at her home in Upper Freehold Township, where a crew was doing horizontal drilling for New Jersey Natural Gas’ Southern Reliability Link, an underground pipeline that would run for 30 miles through Monmouth, Ocean and Burlington counties, intended to provide an alternate delivery route for gas used by NJNG customers.
Friday’s mishap involved what is known as an inadvertent return, or the unintended discharge of drilling mud to the surface through a natural crack or fissure in the bedrock being drilled, a company official said.
A New Jersey Natural Gas spokesman said Saturday that the drilling mud that leaked on Friday was a non-toxic mix of water and naturally occurring clay. The drilling was halted immediately, the Department of Environmental Protection was notified and responded to the scene, and the incident was under investigation, said Kevin Roberts, a NJNG spokesman.
The DEP did not immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday or Saturday.
“I never imagined it could have destroyed my home,” said Fox-Cooper, a 77-year-old widow.
She said she grabbed her laptop, prescription drugs, a few days change of clothes and a bag of toiletries in the two-minute mad dash through her home. She also grabbed important personal documents before running out of the house.
“I didn’t have much time to think ” she said. “I’m just thankful it was a not fire. Fire doesn’t give you any time to think.”
She said she is staying at the home of a family friend and trying to “come up with a game plan” for Monday to have her insurance company and a structural engineer determine if her two-story colonial home can be salvaged.
Fox-Cooper said she had opposed the pipeline for years and said the accident that happened to her occurred even before gas started to flow through the line.
The $180 million project has been opposed by environmentalists, homeowners and some local governments, but has been approved by multiple agencies, including the Pinelands Commission, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the state Board of Public Utilities.
A lawsuit to overturn the approvals by the PBU and Pinelands Commission is now pending in the Appellate Division of State Superior Court after being filed jointly by the New Jersey Sierra Club, the Pinelands Preservation Alliance and the Burlington County townships of Bordentown and Chesterfield.
Barring further delays or a reversal by the courts, the 18-month project is expected to be completed by the end of 2021, Roberts said. Friday’s mishap occurred near the end of first phase of the project, an approximately 22-mile stretch through Monmouth and Ocean counties, which will be followed by a stretch of about 9 miles through Burlington.
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Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com.
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Homeowner had 2 minutes to grab her belongings after N.J. pipeline project wrecked her home. - NJ.com
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