Those waiting for the country’s largest toxic groundwater plume to be remediated might as well think they’re in geological time.
Hydrogeologists say the plume could be moving at about one foot per day, maybe more.
One study suggests it will take more than a century and hundreds of millions of dollars to clean it up fully.
In the meantime, stakeholders and technical experts gather, remediation plans are proposed (and have been put in place), monitoring wells are drilled, and politicians have their say.
But the years pass, and the plume keeps on traveling. It is now threatening water supplies far southeast of its origins, approaching the Southern State Parkway.
And please don’t call it “The Bethpage Plume.”
The “Grumman-Navy Plume” is more appropriate, said more than one speaker at one of a series of public meetings held this spring to discuss the decades-old contamination affecting the Magothy Aquifer that supplies much of Nassau County’s drinking water needs.
County legislators Laura Schaefer and Rose Marie Walker and Town of Oyster Bay Supervisor Joseph Saladino organized an informational meeting at the Bethpage JFK Middle School that featured presentations from officials of the Bethpage Water District (BWD).
Less than a week later, many of the same attendees/speakers could be found at the twice-annual meeting of the Resolution Advisory Board (RAB), instituted to keep the public abreast of the remediation efforts against the toxic slew that has spread from the old Grumman/Naval Weapons Industrial Reserve Plant in Bethpage. The Town of Oyster Bay sponsored yet another meeting on the plume late last month.
Asked about the meeting she helped sponsor, Schaefer responded, via email, “I thought it was important to give Bethpage residents the opportunity to get to know their water commissioner a little better. The members of the BWD are their neighbors. They live there, own businesses and, in that respect, share many of the same concerns on a much more personal level than would someone from the DEC or the Navy. For example, the residents who attended the forum most likely go to eat at BK Sweeney’s restaurant already.
However, now when they go, they feel like they know the owner, John Coumatos, a BWD commissioner, a little better and may feel more comfortable asking him questions as opposed to asking someone from a governmental agency like the NYSDEC. The RAB meetings are necessary and helpful, but I thought bringing the issue down to a more personal level was a good idea and would be well-received, which it was.”
Saladino noted that he had taken the legislative initiative while serving in the New York State Assembly for 13 years. He touted the law which he co-sponsored with Senator Kemp Hannon and passed in 2014. It mandated that the state DEC “create an in-depth report which proves that hydraulic containment will work effectively on the plume and lays out the design of how to best accomplish that goal.”
Saladino said, “There is fear. There is concern. I don’t believe treating our water through wellhead solutions is the best solution, but it’s one that has been utilized.”
Among the notables at the meetings was DEC Remediation and Materials Management Deputy Commissioner Martin Brand.
“New York State has a very simple principle when it comes to remediation,” Brand pronounced. “And that’s to ask polluters to pay to clean up the problem they caused. We need Grumman to expedite the remediation of the plume and pay for it. And to make whole the communities who’ve been bearing the brunt of the contamination.”
Water district officials praised the DEC and Governor Andrew Cuomo for being more responsive to their concerns. The governor, in the 2017-18 state budget, allotted $2.5 billion to improve the water infrastructure. He has also put pressure on the Navy and Northrup Grumman to speed up their containment and remediation efforts.
“We’re paying for the sins of the past,” BWD Superintendent Mike Boufis told a large crowd at the school, where he emceed a program. “The plume is deeper, wider and further south than anyone has ever thought. In the past 18 months we have gotten good info [on its boundaries]. That’s going to help the water suppliers.”
BWD Commissioner John Sullivan, asked to summarize the meeting a week later at the RAB gathering, said its purpose was to “inform the community that the water is safe to drink. And also, the difference between groundwater [which can be contaminated] and drinking water [which has been treated]. It was well attended, and a lot of people got good information.”
“We do take great exception when it’s called the Bethpage Plume, because it’s not,” observed Boufis. “We’re all victims of what happened. What Grumman did, it did. We won a war—that was fine. If Grumman was still here, I don’t think we’d be having this conversation. They were a great neighbor and great to the community when they were here. Well, their jobs are gone, and we’re left cleaning up.”
The BWD and the military contractor have been in litigation as the district seeks to recover the costs of remediating the plume. Grumman, in the early 1970s, turned to the BWD for its drinking water after discovering that its wells had been contaminated.
“When the contamination gets to the point where—quite frankly—we get tired of treating it, we’re moving out,” warned Boufis at the school meeting. “We’re slowly getting out of the plume [but] it’s nothing we can do overnight.”
He added, “This could have been contained 60 years ago. The horse has left the barn. This is going to be a hard task for us to take on.”
Boufis assured the audience of the efficacy of his treatment systems. Further, his wells have remote monitoring systems that will alert his cell phone and iPad if any parameter causes concern. Treatment is expensive, noted Boufis, who mentioned a $600,000 yearly electric bill and $185,000 to change its carbon filters.
To a resident’s query, Boufis said a whole house water filter would be a waste of money.
“There is no contamination from Northrup Grumman in your drinking water,” Boufis told his questioner. “If there is a taste, it’s probably from chlorine.”
Boufis suggested that leaving a pitcher of water in the fridge uncovered overnight will solve the chlorine issue.
“Our number one priority is to make sure that Bethpage water is safe to drink,” Boufis summed up.
Radium Concerns At Bethpage High School
After test results showed that elevated levels of radium had been found in wells on the Bethpage High School campus, the Bethpage Water District released a statement clarifying that the tests had been done on shallow groundwater monitoring wells only, and not on drinking water wells. The district quoted a statement from the New York Sate Department of Environmental Conservation, which read: “…the groundwater is not used for drinking and there is no other exposure to groundwater (the water is 60 feet below ground surface), there are no immediate health concerns identified for students, staff or visitors to the school due to the presence of radium.”
“Further, we demand all elected officials and leaders to join with us today to call upon Northrup Grumman and the United States Navy to take responsibility and work with the community to resolve all the issues related to the Northrup Grumman Plume,” the district said.
—Additional reporting by Joseph Catrone
