Wall Township Sued Over Precarious Sewer Line

A Shark River advocacy group has sued Wall, charging the township has left a sewer line in a precarious position that could threaten the water supply for thousands of residents across Monmouth County.

The Shark River Cleanup Coalition claims Wall is violating the federal Clean Water Act because of a section of unearthed sewer line that runs through property between Garden State Parkway and Campus Parkway.

"Due to lack of maintenance, there were very large washouts of soil from the sanitary sewer easements into the streams," said John Brennan, the attorney for the advocacy group.

"Those washouts uncovered large stretches of the sanitary sewer pipe that are now flying in the air subject to any force that may break the pipe and cause a discharge of raw sewage."

The Shark River Cleanup Coalition is seeking an injunction that would force both Wall and the landowner, the estate of Fred McDowell Jr., to shore up erosion surrounding a 3-mile-long sewer line.

The lawsuit is also seeking damages for sediments that have already run off into Shark River Brook, which feeds into the Shark River and a watershed linked to a water system that serves at least 245,000 customers.

Wall's municipal attorney called the federal lawsuit a "PR tool" to draw attention and an attempt to get money from the township.

"A better approach was to call us and say, 'We think you have a violation there and we’d love to educate you about the way to fix this,'" Wall's municipal attorney Sean T. Kean said.

Kean said Wall officials aren't yet sure there is a problem with the sewer line, but if there is, the lawsuit only adds to the township's costs to repair it.

The federal lawsuit includes images of the erosion, which swept away soil around and under the sewer pipe, but does not say in what locations along the 3.15-mile pipe that it occurred.

The Shark River Cleanup Coalition filed the lawsuit on Oct. 10 in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, but released a press release about it Wednesday, nearly a month later.

Brennan said the group went public with the lawsuit because they were not seeing action to correct what he called "an imminent threat of discharge of pollutants" into the nearby Shark River Brook, which feeds into the Shark River.

Brennan said the group has been trying to get Wall to act on the pipe for more than a year.

Wall obtained an easement through McDowell's 460-acre property for the sewer line via eminent domain in 1991. McDowell died in June 2016.

The coalition sought Wall's maintenance agreement for the easement in April 2016 but was told the township did not have any records of an agreement, the lawsuit said.

The coalition also sent a certified notice of its intent to sue under the Clean Water Act in October 2016, which included all of the same allegations in the lawsuit. Brennan said the township never responded.

Kean, however, said Wall's engineer did reach out to the coalition via email asking what the problem was with the sewer line but got no response.



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