– Thousands of gallons of diesel fuel have spilled from a New Jersey data center into wetlands feeding the Hackensack River, sparking a major cleanup operation and fury over the industry’s rapid expansion across the state.
Around 5,000 gallons of fuel escaped from a storage tank at Equinix’s NY2 data center in Secaucus on Friday evening before flowing into Anderson Creek, a narrow tributary running through the environmentally sensitive Meadowlands.
Secaucus Mayor Michael Gonnelli blamed the massive spill on a ‘computer glitch,’ although Equinix said it was still investigating exactly what went wrong.
Crews have since deployed containment barriers and vacuum trucks to suck a mixture of diesel and water from the creek.
The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection said the fuel was stopped before reaching the Hackensack River itself.
Environmental campaigners have questioned whether the contamination could have been completely contained and have described the spill as a ‘slap in the face’ as authorities prepare for a major federal cleanup of the heavily polluted Hackensack.
‘The tributaries are the capillary system of the whole ecosystem,’ Hackensack Riverkeeper Bill Sheehan told Gothamist.
‘All the water that runs off of our land goes into the creeks first, and then runs through the creeks out into the river.’
Equinix said staff detected a fuel release from a tank outside its facility on September 11 and stopped the leak before bringing in environmental contractor Clean Harbors.
The Secaucus Fire Department also responded, with the DEP and Hudson Regional Health Commission also notified.
Mayor Gonnelli stressed that the data center had operated for decades without a similar incident.
‘This data center’s been here since 2001, over 25 years. We’ve never had a problem before this time,’ he said.
The DEP said the spilled substance was diesel fuel and that the leak had been contained.
Gonnelli estimated the cleanup was around three-quarters complete, although the odor of oil could still be detected around the site.
‘There’s a lot of complaints about data centers, I can tell you that,’ he said. ‘But right now, they did everything they had to do.’
Sheehan witnessed the response firsthand while leading a boat tour along the Hackensack on Saturday, when he saw contractors laying a boom across Anderson Creek.
He later watched vacuum trucks extracting contaminated water, which was being taken away for treatment and disposal.
The Hackensack River is already poised for an enormous restoration effort after a contaminated section was added to the federal Superfund list in 2022.
The spill has also added to an increasingly bitter political fight over the explosion of data centers in New Jersey.
Nearly 100 municipalities have enacted local restrictions on new facilities, while activists have demanded a statewide moratorium.
Ben Dziobek, executive director of the Gen-Z-led Climate Revolution Action Network, said the Secaucus spill demonstrated why leaving regulation to individual communities was inadequate.
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