Officials said Tuesday it will be some time before they reopen a Woodbridge Township, New Jersey, road that is closed due to a mysterious, long crack.

The damage to Smith Street is affecting traffic in Middlesex County and has neighbors on edge.

"The road has to be entirely redone"  

Woodbridge Mayor John McCormac insisted Tuesday that residents who have returned to the area after being briefly evacuated are safe and that alarms will detect a road shift.

"There are monitors out there and equipment that can literally tell if it moved," McCormac said.

The mayor said the road has moved an eighth of an inch in the past 24 hours.

McCormac said the problem is Smith Street is a major thoroughfare and it's going to take months to repair the roadway.

"The road has to be entirely redone -- take everything out and start all over," he said. "If you look at a map, it's a spaghetti factory of roads and this road is smack in the middle of all of it, and the blockage on Smith impacts so many businesses and so many residents."

The mayor said a cause can't be determined until crews get underground. For now, he says they are keeping an eye out to make sure gas lines don't move and electric poles don't stretch as they make repairs.  

Theories abound as to why crack formed

Residents said they first noticed a small crack in the road that sits on the border of Perth Amboy and the Keasbey section of Woodbridge on Thursday morning. By the evening, however, the crack had grown into a two-foot gap in the road.

"What's going to happen if the crack gets bigger? We don't know," Lehman said.

Josefina Jerez told CBS News New York in Spanish the crack is ugly. Her home was one of the 18 evacuated Thursday, but she and others were eventually allowed back in.

As for a cause, the mayor said it could be anything, but he doesn't believe it's because of the street's age or mines underneath. Residents have their own theories, including one that has to do with the construction of a nearby warehouse.

"Whatever they're digging for to put that warehouse up, that's causing the dirt to fall down," Keasbey resident George Cicchini said.

"It could be the construction. There are so many trucks going up here from Perth Amboy," another resident said.