Route 80: Highway to Hell

Commuters and residents of Centenary University, beware!

For the mines of Moria beneath Route I-80 have opened to swallow you whole!

Take it from me, a seasoned veteran who's been driving on this road since I was 18; I’ve seen everything. I’ve seen it all.

Apparently, the universe decided this highway was either not bad enough or so evil that it deserved to be destroyed. As you may have heard or, God have mercy on your soul, experienced, a massive sinkhole suddenly opened on Route I-80 West last week on March 19, 2025.

However, this isn’t the first time Route I-80 collapsed in on itself from the inside. On December 26, 2024, just outside East exit 34 in Wharton, a large sinkhole suddenly emerged, collapsing an area of approximately 11x11 feet. This sinkhole mirrors its accompanying West-bound hole that effectively halted all East-bound traffic.

Route I-80, better locally known as Route 80, is an infamous highway in New Jersey, a perpetually trafficked artery that runs from the east to the west side of the state. At approximately 68.54 miles long, it runs from the Delaware Water Gap on the border of Pennsylvania to the end of the New Jersey Turnpike.

It is a popular route for workers and students alike, especially since the highway is the fastest way to get to and from New York City. The road is also notorious for its ever-present truck parades and speed limit “suggestion.”

Why is it a suggestion and not a limit?

Well, although the speed limit signs clearly state 65MPH, most drivers prefer to race up to a whopping 85MPH in the two leftmost lanes.

Unfortunately, staying in the remaining right lanes also has its own issues. Thanks to the constant presence of trucks and grandmas who forgot how to drive, the 65MPH suggestion is instead of 40MPH.

You could go the proper 65 MPH speed limit but expect to be harassed, cut off, flipped off, and brake checked by bozos from New York, who are angry you aren’t breaking the law faster.

When one takes Route 80, one must also decide: “Do I want to get to my destination in five minutes or five hours?” There is no happy median on this four-lane highway.

As the motto of Route 80 goes: “If we are all speeding or going too slow, the police can’t pull us all over!”

That’s not even bringing up the fact that the road has been under construction since the day I was born. What year was that? I’m not telling, but trust me when I say long enough to know how long construction should reasonably take.

Expect to see lanes closed, random warnings for workers who aren’t present, and surprise construction with no warning signs around steep bends!

You should also expect random traffic jams for no discernible reason, but this is more of a problem with people not knowing how to drive than an issue exclusive to Route 80. The same goes for accidents.

As you can predict, this sinkhole leads to massive delays and detours, extending trips up to 30 minutes.

Not long after the hole was plugged, it opened back up again! Construction resumed on February 10, 2025, and is still ongoing, with an estimated duration of another few months. Reports indicate that the sinkhole was improperly filled, most likely due to hasty repairs, which led to the hole reopening.

If all that still wasn’t enough, we now have the latest hole on Route 80, this time Westbound just across from the first hole. Perhaps the other side of the highway felt left out of all the attention and decided to make it even.

This 15x15-foot hole was the most devastating so far, gaping wide on the evening of March 19, 2025. To make matters worse, nearly all back roads going west the following morning were closed or clogged due to bumper-to-bumper traffic, including Route 10, Route 46, Route 15, and other roads I’ve never even heard of, much less traveled upon. A reasonable 45-minute commute turned into a 3-hour drive of pain and suffering.

When you leave to go to work/school, you're a fresh-faced young person, and by the time you get home, you look old enough to reminisce about the Black Plague.

So what the hell is going on?!

Well, it’s actually kind of interesting.

You may be surprised to hear that New Jersey is actually full of abandoned mineshafts, which run across the state's Eastern and Western sides. Morris County alone is home to over 100 mines!

While New Jersey is mostly known today for its vibrant nature, stunning hilly landscapes, and terrible reality TV, it was a different story in the 17th century.

New Jersey was a primary exporter of iron in early America, with most of its iron going straight to supporting the colonial army during the Revolutionary War. The New Jersey iron trade eventually fizzled out, with the last mine closing in 1986. Today, it is estimated that nearly 600 mine shafts exist beneath our feet and our roads!

Back to the present, torturous reality, the timbers holding up the tunnels rot away over time, causing the sinkholes that pollute our lives today.

Gives you something to think about while you bash your head against the steering wheel wondering what moron architect thought it would be a good idea to build a highway on top of an incredibly unstable mine shaft.

Unfortunately, this issue doesn’t look like it will improve anytime soon. If these mines are half as expansive as old geographical maps suggest, these sinkholes will continue to open. The earth beneath Route 80 is the equivalent of Swiss cheese, requiring only the slightest pressure to break.

It is miraculous that no one has been hurt yet, and hopefully, it will stay that way.

Information for this article was sourced from the following articles…

NJDEP Bureau of GIS, “Abandoned Mines in New Jersey,” 21 June 2006.

U.S. HISTORIC MINING PHOTOS BY STATE, “NEW JERSEY MINES,” 2025, by David Johnson.

OFFICIAL SITE OF THE STATE OF NEW JERSEY, “I-80 Eastbound Sinkhole,” 20 March 2025.