By Hank Russell
Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine and Riverhead Town Supervisor Jerry Halpin held a press conference on May 12 calling for the United States Navy to come up with a remediation plan for the former Grumman site at Calverton.
Romaine said he will be sending a letter to Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao signed by all Riverhead Town and Suffolk County officials telling the Navy to “clean up your mess.”
“It’s been 30 years and in those 30 years, the ponds and eventually now the river have been impacted by the contamination that the Navy left behind,” ROmaine said. “What we’re asking the Navy to do is to do what they should have done years ago is address this problem and come up with a long-term plan to clean up this pollution.”
In a copy of the letter obtained by Long Island Life & Politics, the county conducted water tests at the former Grumman site and found high levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including PFAS and 1.4-dioxane, which exceeded the New York State Drinking Water Standards.
Suffolk County Legislator Greg Doroski (D-Riverhead) said he found the results “concerning” and told the Navy to “clean up your mess. It’s your responsibility. … If this were you or I, we would have been forced to clean it up a long time ago.”
Romaine said, in an effort to protect the water quality in the town, the county will provide approximately $8 million for water mains to Peonic Lake Estates on both sides of County Road 94.
He said he was “somewhat upset” to learn that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was “less concerned about local grants for water quality” and that water quality will be “A critical issue … in the days ahead.”
The Navy will have a residential advisory board meeting next month, but it will be a virtual meeting, which Romaine calls “unacceptable,” adding, “They should come to Suffolk County and meet in person the people whose health they’ve affected.”
Doroski said the Navy is ducking its responsibility to clean the property, which is “unacceptable.”
Romaine said there has been “a suggestion” to remove Suffolk’s chief hydologist Andy Payton — who conducted testing on the site — from the residential advisory board (RAB), of which he has been a member for 19 years. “I hope that’s not the case,” Romaine said. If they did, “it would be a terrible mistake.”
Riverhead Town Councilman Ken Kern said removing Repayto from the RAB is like “throwing the truth in the garbage. If the RAB is afraid of the truth, then we have a major problem with the RAB.”
Kern said the last RAB meeting was “contentious” and said the Navy wanted a virtual meeting because “they don’t want a challenge and we’re here to challenge them.”
“Protecting the town’s water quality is paramount,” Halpin said. “We want to take action, but we want to do it amicably. We want this letter to be a unifying force for the residents.”
He also called on the residents to stand together “to make sure drinking water isn’t just available today, but 30, 40, 50, 100 years from now.”
“It’s been 30 years — 30 years of inaction,” said Riverhead Town Councilwoman Denise Merrifield. “It’s gotta stop.”
In a press release obtained by LILP, the Navy said that it “has been evaluating historical PFAS releases” at the Calverton site “since 2016 and prioritized efforts to identify and address PFAS in drinking water. The Navy has completed several rounds of private well sampling, as thresholds have developed, to sample drinking water wells for PFAS in the direction of groundwater flow away from the former Grumman facility.”
Other plans, according to the Navy, is looking into the presence of 1,4-dioxane at Swan Pond, with sampling planned to begin next year.
As for the county’s results, “The Navy has now reviewed the results of Suffolk County’s separate private drinking water sampling efforts,” the press release stated. “Although the Navy is unable to validate whether this separate sampling effort conformed to the Navy’s stringent sampling and analysis protocols, the county private drinking water well results are consistent with the Navy’s sampling results: no private drinking water wells within the Navy’s designated testing areas contained concentrations that exceed the relevant action threshold.”