More test results still pending on drums from Bethpage park dig
Ongoing work at a pit in Bethpage Community Park is shown here Tuesday. Contractors have unearthed 16 chemical drums from the site recently and tests on the contents of the first six drums that were removed showed they contained waste petroleum and chlorinated solvents including trichloroethylene, a carcinogen. Credit: Newsday/J. Conrad Williams Jr.
Oyster Bay officials said Tuesday they still were awaiting test results on the contents of the 10 chemical drums most recently unearthed from Bethpage Community Park on the site of a former Grumman Aerospace dumping ground.
Starting early last week, contractors excavated 16 drums in all, with tests showing the first six drums contained waste petroleum and chlorinated solvents including trichloroethylene (TCE), a known carcinogen.
Oyster Bay Supervisor Joseph Saladino said Tuesday that Northrop Grumman's “snail pace of work at the park continues to demonstrate” the need for regulatory agencies to hold the company accountable.
Grumman Aerospace is the predecessor of Northrop Grumman, which the town sued last year over the pace of the ongoing remediation effort at the park.
Northrop Grumman didn't respond to a request for comment Tuesday on the test results or the three possible underground “anomalies” outside the immediate excavation area the DEC said Monday were discovered through ground scans.
The DEC also didn't comment Tuesday but previously described the substances found in the first drums as “consistent with known historic operations” of Grumman and the U.S. Navy on the site.
Grumman gave the land to the town in 1962 but didn't disclose the contamination.
Joseph Ostapiuk covers the Town of Oyster Bay and the City of Glen Cove. He joined Newsday in 2023 after spending more than six years at the Staten Island Advance/SILive.com.
