New Bethpage health study sought after discovery of buried Grumman chemical drums
Elected officials and residents are calling for a new health study following the discovery of chemical drums beneath the Grumman dumping ground that became Bethpage Community Park.
The lawmakers — Democrats and Republicans in federal, state, county and town offices — told Newsday the New York State Department of Health is overdue to conduct a comprehensive review of cancer and other illnesses in the area where Grumman’s historic disposal of toxic waste polluted soil and groundwater.
The 22 concrete-encased drums found this spring contained numerous carcinogenic metals and compounds the aerospace giant had used in its manufacturing. Environmental regulators said they showed no evidence of contributing to the already well-established contamination of Bethpage by the same materials.
The only state cancer study of the area is 11 years old. Experts and advocates long have deemed it insufficient. Now, with the drums' unearthing, current and former Bethpage residents, along with Grumman critics, see a fresh opportunity to press for a new study they hope will answer the question of any possible link between what the company left behind and peoples' health.
Years after regulators said "buried drums do not exist beneath the park," the development has unsettled a community that sees it as the latest in a six-decade saga of deception, minimization and missed cleanup opportunities. A groundwater plume of pollutants stemming from Grumman and U.S. Navy operations in Bethpage has spread miles to the south and compelled a cleanup agreement costing upward of $500 million.
Newsday reported this week that a new contractor is using ground-penetrating radar to search the park for more buried drums after some were found this spring only by consulting historical photographs — and not through a previous company's scans.
"We know the water’s tested, we know that the site is tested, but our confidence has been shaken," Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-Glen Cove) said in an interview. "So we need to find out whether or not people really are going to be safe in the long term."
Town of Oyster Bay Supervisor Joseph Saladino, a Republican, said "the continued discovery of Grumman contaminants in the ground, along with the growing plume, warrant an updated and in-depth health study."
The officials interviewed by Newsday, including the area's state senator and county legislator, have yet to author a letter that formally requests a new study but said that step may come soon.
Images of workers in full hazmat suits handling the drums are also resurfacing residents’ suspicions about the toll they believe living in Bethpage has taken, contrary to officials’ assertions that the drinking water supply, treated since the late 1980s to remove contaminants, is safe to use, and that exposure to Bethpage Community Park’s tainted soil, on a ballfield shuttered since 2002, is limited.
Jim Ostrowski, 73, a retired field engineer, settled in Bethpage in 1980 and raised his two children there. His wife, Barbara, a preschool teacher, died of breast cancer at age 49 in 2002 — the same year Oyster Bay first closed the park’s ballfield.
In that same time period, he said, two other outwardly healthy women in their 40s living directly next to him also died of cancer. Residents have told similar stories for many years, without scientific proof.
"I'm kind of a numbers guy and I go, ‘Gee, this one's a tough one for me to swallow,’ because of the coincidence of [it also happening] across the street, two doors down," said Ostrowski, who now lives in Blue Point.
He recalled an oncologist’s comment to him at the time. "They’d say, ‘It seems to fall within the parameters.' It doesn’t fall in my parameters."
In 2009, following soil vapors of the toxic degreasing solvent trichloroethylene, or TCE, seeping into a few homes just outside Bethpage Community Park, local lawmakers formally requested an evaluation of cancer in the area.
The state health department released its sole study in January 2013, stating there were no higher overall rates of cancer, compared to what could be expected, in a 19-block area closest to the 600-acre Grumman site. It rejected calls to examine a much wider swath of the community, saying it could dilute results.
Officials acknowledged that within a one-block area, all those diagnosed with cancer were unusually young but said it was too small an area to conclusively prove a so-called "cluster."
Critics said the study was superficial: It could not match much of a list of about 80 local cancer patients provided by residents with a state database of verified cancer cases, and the study's authors said they could not fully view identifying information in photographs of a makeshift pin map provided by residents.
The study did not include extensive research, canvassing and interviews that might have widened the scope, records show. It acknowledged: "Much of the information that would have been useful for a more complete cancer evaluation was not available."
"People still ask the question continuously: ‘Why hasn’t anything been done besides that ridiculous study?’ " said Jeanne O’Connor, who cofounded a Bethpage community group that logged thousands of local cancer cases in hopes of getting the state to revisit the issue. "I would love for the state to do something. I don’t have any faith they will."
Erin Clary, a state health department spokeswoman, said in a statement, "When and where community concerns are raised, the Department of Health’s role is to evaluate whether there are — or have been — exposures that may have affected public health and to provide a transparent report with an explanation of previous and current health risks."
"This role has been carried out," she said.
Clary cited the 2013 cancer study and a separate "health consultation" issued by the department in 2022 that was prepared with the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
That 2022 report, issued 10 years after a concerned citizen wrote a letter requesting it, was not a cancer study. It cited the long-standing removal systems for TCE and other established groundwater contaminants to conclude that "drinking or other uses of water from public supplies affected by" the Grumman plume "are unlikely to harm people’s health."
Treatment for emerging contaminants now subject to strict government standards, such as 1,4-dioxane and PFAS chemicals, didn't come until the last decade.
The health department offered one potential concern: that past use of drinking water from one public well in Bethpage — before December 1976, when it was first closed due to TCE contamination — "could have increased the risk for noncancer adverse health effects," including immune system deficiencies or developmental effects in infants.
Grumman used TCE liberally for many years, in degreasing vats, storage tanks and spray guns on site, as well as discharging TCE wastewater and rags soaked with the solvent directly into the ground on the property that became Bethpage Community Park. As Newsday reported in 2020, the company initially publicly denied using the dangerous chemical despite holding private evidence of its responsibility for contaminating the well.
An environmental engineer from Northrop Grumman, the company’s corporate successor, would privately email a colleague in 2011 to express shock at the extent Grumman may have released TCE into the earth. The email, mistakenly left unsealed as an exhibit in a federal lawsuit between Northrop Grumman and its insurers, prompted his colleague to reply that the thought "caused my insides to start churnin’ somethin’ fierce!!"
A Northrop Grumman spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
The state health department did not provide a cost for its 2013 Bethpage cancer study, or estimate the budget for a new one. Clary said such investigations are largely conducted "within existing resources" without specific line items in the budget.
The department "does not have plans to conduct similar studies at this time," related to the Grumman site, Clary said.
Lawmakers call that position shortsighted.
"An 11-year gap certainly would afford additional opportunity to see how any cancer clusters have developed, and what the additional impacts as a result of continued exposure might be," said State Sen. Steven Rhoads (R-North Bellmore), whose district includes Bethpage.
An extensive cancer study might actually assure residents, he said, since perhaps cancer rates went down as a result of the ongoing plume containment and cleanup.
"So I think it could provide a very important earmark for us to judge the effectiveness of the cleanup," Rhoads said.
Nassau County Legis. Rose Walker (R-Hicksville) said officials have seemed dismissive of past requests to probe community health concerns more deeply.
"Another study is very much needed," Walker said. "Sadly, when it comes to this whole Grumman Navy plume, I feel like that's the attitude from the get-go. They treated it with the teeniest little Band-Aid. And from the get-go, it needed a tourniquet."
Experts, however, say the process itself of researching links between cancer and environmental causes is flawed.
In 2012, four academic researchers published a paper in the scientific journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology that looked at 428 government community cancer cluster investigations conducted nationwide over a 20-year period. It found that just three, including infamous cases in Woburn, Massachusetts, and Toms River, New Jersey, had been linked to environmental exposures.
"It is fair to state that extensive efforts to find causes of community cancer clusters have not been successful," the paper concluded. "There are fundamental shortcomings to our current methods of investigating community cancer clusters."
The authors cited problems, including failures to consider changes in a community’s population over time and biases in defining the boundary of a suspected cluster, leading to "the overestimation of the disease rate."
"Unfortunately, many states do not have accurate tracking systems, and many do not track the full range of conditions that may be linked to toxic exposure," said Laura B. Hart, a Missouri State University sociology professor who was not involved in the 2012 paper, but wrote a book on the general topic, "Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town."
Hart argued that only long-term studies of large populations can characterize risk assessment from a particular environmental cause with any degree of accuracy. Conservative cutoffs for statistical significance in scientific hypothesis testing is one complication. People being exposed to many carcinogenic compounds over their lifetime from many sources is another.
Asked what she'd tell a frustrated resident, Hart responded that they have a right to a government cancer study and "they would benefit from recognizing that science is really important, but it won’t solve this problem.
"In a context where corporations hold so much power and have shaped the laws that impact community health, residents must play outside the rules," Hart said. "Although this can take a long time, they must put together a strategic plan to demand change through political power."
Since the state’s cancer study was published in 2013, a wave of litigation alleging the Grumman contamination caused people serious illness and injury has swept through the federal court system.
The most significant case, filed in U.S. Eastern District Court in Central Islip in 2016, seeks to establish a class of tens of thousands of people in the Bethpage area who would be eligible for funds for both medical monitoring and care and compensation for loss of property value. It alleges that residents’ exposure to Grumman contamination came not just from groundwater and soil vapors, but also air emissions.
Northrop Grumman has said the allegations are without merit. A judge in U.S. District Court in Central Islip had been considering motions filed in 2021 and 2022 to certify or reject the classes, a significant step that many similar cases never reach.
Each side commissioned numerous medical and environmental experts to make their arguments and filed exhibits totaling several thousand pages. Class-action cases seeking medical monitoring funds typically require a lower burden than personal injury classes, needing only to prove an increased risk of harm within a certain group or geographical boundary.
In a sign of the case’s stakes, Magistrate Judge Steven Tiscione this year stayed the pending class certification motions and appointed a neutral monitor to negotiate a potential global settlement.
As of May, the parties reported having three mediation sessions, with three more planned. The next update is scheduled for September.
Plaintiff attorney Robert Gitelman, of the Melville- and Manhattan-based personal injury firm Napoli Shkolnik, said there are upward of 2,300 potential clients in and around Bethpage between class representatives and all the individual personal-injury cases. Nearly 500 people have filed personal injury claims, he said.
"People call every day, especially after all of these drum findings," Gitelman told Newsday.
Of the level of health studies conducted to date in Bethpage, he said: "I don’t think it’s been fully fleshed out, and I think it’s swept under the rug."
Clary, the state health department spokeswoman, said the department "does not . . . perform health studies based upon such litigation."
Northrop Grumman has not publicly disclosed how much money it believes it may have to pay in a settlement or judgment.
"We cannot at this time predict or reasonably estimate the potential cumulative outcomes or ranges of possible liability of these Bethpage lawsuits," Northrop Grumman wrote in its most recent annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Even for people not eligible to join the litigation, news of the buried chemical drums brought back questions about loved ones’ deaths — not just 20 years ago, but in one case, even 60 years prior.
Christine Fischette, 69, of Smithtown, grew up on Sycamore Avenue in Bethpage, only a few hundred feet from the future park where chemicals were dumped and drums buried.
She lost her younger sister, Cynthia, at age 4 to a brain tumor in 1961, the year before Grumman gifted that land to the town for Bethpage Community Park. The ballfield that was built over an "open pit" for TCE-soaked rags was directly on the other side of the fence from where Sycamore crosses with what's known as Bethpage's "Number Streets."
At least two other young children within a block or two of her house died of brain tumors around the same time, Fischette said, still recalling their full names and addresses. She said she was "infuriated" to hear that drums had been beneath the ground for decades without the apparent knowledge or disclosure from anyone in a position of authority.
"The drums that were encased in cement. That really hit home," Fischette said in an interview. "Then to donate that land to make a park for children to play on?"
Jim Ostrowski’s daughter, Jessica, was 14 when her mother, Barbara, died in 2002, after a several-year battle with cancer.
Now 36, Jessica Ostrowski is engaged to be married next month. She says she often thinks of her mother, who put on elaborate circus fairs for her preschool students and taught them how to sign "I love you" to their families.
Whether Grumman contamination had anything to do with her mother's cancer, it also has always been at the front of her mind.
"Every time I hear another [cancer diagnosis from Bethpage]: someone my age, someone else's parent, someone else younger," Jessica Ostrowski said. "So seeing people in hazmat suits handle, essentially, containers in a tomb — I really hate to put emotion into it and say it got me angry. But it got me angry."
She said she supports the type of cancer study that would encompass more or all of Bethpage, with an effort to find multiple generations of current and former residents and their health histories.
"Nothing's going to change the trajectory of our lives. But at least we’d be given the opportunity to have our voice," Jessica Ostrowski said. "And you know what? My mom deserves to be heard."
Elected officials and residents are calling for a new health study following the discovery of chemical drums beneath the Grumman dumping ground that became Bethpage Community Park.
The lawmakers — Democrats and Republicans in federal, state, county and town offices — told Newsday the New York State Department of Health is overdue to conduct a comprehensive review of cancer and other illnesses in the area where Grumman’s historic disposal of toxic waste polluted soil and groundwater.
The 22 concrete-encased drums found this spring contained numerous carcinogenic metals and compounds the aerospace giant had used in its manufacturing. Environmental regulators said they showed no evidence of contributing to the already well-established contamination of Bethpage by the same materials.
The only state cancer study of the area is 11 years old. Experts and advocates long have deemed it insufficient. Now, with the drums' unearthing, current and former Bethpage residents, along with Grumman critics, see a fresh opportunity to press for a new study they hope will answer the question of any possible link between what the company left behind and peoples' health.
WHAT TO KNOW
- Lawmakers are calling for the state health department to conduct a new, comprehensive study of cancer in Bethpage after the discovery of chemical drums in the former Grumman dumping ground turned community park.
- Regulators say there's no evidence the drums unearthed this spring contributed to the already well-established soil and groundwater contamination in the area.
- But people in the community say they are unsettled, and they believe the only prior Bethpage cancer study, from 2013, was insufficient
Years after regulators said "buried drums do not exist beneath the park," the development has unsettled a community that sees it as the latest in a six-decade saga of deception, minimization and missed cleanup opportunities. A groundwater plume of pollutants stemming from Grumman and U.S. Navy operations in Bethpage has spread miles to the south and compelled a cleanup agreement costing upward of $500 million.
Newsday reported this week that a new contractor is using ground-penetrating radar to search the park for more buried drums after some were found this spring only by consulting historical photographs — and not through a previous company's scans.
"We know the water’s tested, we know that the site is tested, but our confidence has been shaken," Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-Glen Cove) said in an interview. "So we need to find out whether or not people really are going to be safe in the long term."
We know the water’s tested, we know that the site is tested, but our confidence has been shaken.
— Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-Glen Cove)
Credit: Anthony Florio
Town of Oyster Bay Supervisor Joseph Saladino, a Republican, said "the continued discovery of Grumman contaminants in the ground, along with the growing plume, warrant an updated and in-depth health study."
The officials interviewed by Newsday, including the area's state senator and county legislator, have yet to author a letter that formally requests a new study but said that step may come soon.
Images of workers in full hazmat suits handling the drums are also resurfacing residents’ suspicions about the toll they believe living in Bethpage has taken, contrary to officials’ assertions that the drinking water supply, treated since the late 1980s to remove contaminants, is safe to use, and that exposure to Bethpage Community Park’s tainted soil, on a ballfield shuttered since 2002, is limited.
The ballfield at Bethpage Community Park in January 2019. Credit: Linda Rosier
Jim Ostrowski, 73, a retired field engineer, settled in Bethpage in 1980 and raised his two children there. His wife, Barbara, a preschool teacher, died of breast cancer at age 49 in 2002 — the same year Oyster Bay first closed the park’s ballfield.
In that same time period, he said, two other outwardly healthy women in their 40s living directly next to him also died of cancer. Residents have told similar stories for many years, without scientific proof.
Former Bethpage resident Jim Ostrowski lost his wife, Barbara, at 49 to breast cancer in 2002. Credit: Randee Daddona
"I'm kind of a numbers guy and I go, ‘Gee, this one's a tough one for me to swallow,’ because of the coincidence of [it also happening] across the street, two doors down," said Ostrowski, who now lives in Blue Point.
He recalled an oncologist’s comment to him at the time. "They’d say, ‘It seems to fall within the parameters.' It doesn’t fall in my parameters."
A lone study
In 2009, following soil vapors of the toxic degreasing solvent trichloroethylene, or TCE, seeping into a few homes just outside Bethpage Community Park, local lawmakers formally requested an evaluation of cancer in the area.
The state health department released its sole study in January 2013, stating there were no higher overall rates of cancer, compared to what could be expected, in a 19-block area closest to the 600-acre Grumman site. It rejected calls to examine a much wider swath of the community, saying it could dilute results.
Officials acknowledged that within a one-block area, all those diagnosed with cancer were unusually young but said it was too small an area to conclusively prove a so-called "cluster."
A map showing the focus of a 2013 state cancer study highlighted in yellow. Credit: Newsday/Andrew Wong
Critics said the study was superficial: It could not match much of a list of about 80 local cancer patients provided by residents with a state database of verified cancer cases, and the study's authors said they could not fully view identifying information in photographs of a makeshift pin map provided by residents.
The study did not include extensive research, canvassing and interviews that might have widened the scope, records show. It acknowledged: "Much of the information that would have been useful for a more complete cancer evaluation was not available."
"People still ask the question continuously: ‘Why hasn’t anything been done besides that ridiculous study?’ " said Jeanne O’Connor, who cofounded a Bethpage community group that logged thousands of local cancer cases in hopes of getting the state to revisit the issue. "I would love for the state to do something. I don’t have any faith they will."
Erin Clary, a state health department spokeswoman, said in a statement, "When and where community concerns are raised, the Department of Health’s role is to evaluate whether there are — or have been — exposures that may have affected public health and to provide a transparent report with an explanation of previous and current health risks."
"This role has been carried out," she said.
The Department of Health’s role is to evaluate whether there are — or have been — exposures that may have affected public health …. This role has been carried out.
— Erin Clary, state health department spokeswoman
Clary cited the 2013 cancer study and a separate "health consultation" issued by the department in 2022 that was prepared with the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
That 2022 report, issued 10 years after a concerned citizen wrote a letter requesting it, was not a cancer study. It cited the long-standing removal systems for TCE and other established groundwater contaminants to conclude that "drinking or other uses of water from public supplies affected by" the Grumman plume "are unlikely to harm people’s health."
Treatment for emerging contaminants now subject to strict government standards, such as 1,4-dioxane and PFAS chemicals, didn't come until the last decade.
The health department offered one potential concern: that past use of drinking water from one public well in Bethpage — before December 1976, when it was first closed due to TCE contamination — "could have increased the risk for noncancer adverse health effects," including immune system deficiencies or developmental effects in infants.
Grumman used TCE liberally for many years, in degreasing vats, storage tanks and spray guns on site, as well as discharging TCE wastewater and rags soaked with the solvent directly into the ground on the property that became Bethpage Community Park. As Newsday reported in 2020, the company initially publicly denied using the dangerous chemical despite holding private evidence of its responsibility for contaminating the well.
An environmental engineer from Northrop Grumman, the company’s corporate successor, would privately email a colleague in 2011 to express shock at the extent Grumman may have released TCE into the earth. The email, mistakenly left unsealed as an exhibit in a federal lawsuit between Northrop Grumman and its insurers, prompted his colleague to reply that the thought "caused my insides to start churnin’ somethin’ fierce!!"
A Northrop Grumman spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
In its 2013 report, the state Department of Health outlined larger areas of concern in Bethpage that residents and lawmakers wanted studied. The department, however, focused only on a 19-block area just outside the park.
'Very much needed'
The state health department did not provide a cost for its 2013 Bethpage cancer study, or estimate the budget for a new one. Clary said such investigations are largely conducted "within existing resources" without specific line items in the budget.
The department "does not have plans to conduct similar studies at this time," related to the Grumman site, Clary said.
Lawmakers call that position shortsighted.
"An 11-year gap certainly would afford additional opportunity to see how any cancer clusters have developed, and what the additional impacts as a result of continued exposure might be," said State Sen. Steven Rhoads (R-North Bellmore), whose district includes Bethpage.
An extensive cancer study might actually assure residents, he said, since perhaps cancer rates went down as a result of the ongoing plume containment and cleanup.
"So I think it could provide a very important earmark for us to judge the effectiveness of the cleanup," Rhoads said.
Nassau County Legis. Rose Walker (R-Hicksville) said officials have seemed dismissive of past requests to probe community health concerns more deeply.
"Another study is very much needed," Walker said. "Sadly, when it comes to this whole Grumman Navy plume, I feel like that's the attitude from the get-go. They treated it with the teeniest little Band-Aid. And from the get-go, it needed a tourniquet."
They treated it with the teeniest little Band-Aid. And from the get-go, it needed a tourniquet.
— Nassau County Legis. Rose Walker (R-Hicksville)
Credit: Howard Schnapp
Experts, however, say the process itself of researching links between cancer and environmental causes is flawed.
In 2012, four academic researchers published a paper in the scientific journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology that looked at 428 government community cancer cluster investigations conducted nationwide over a 20-year period. It found that just three, including infamous cases in Woburn, Massachusetts, and Toms River, New Jersey, had been linked to environmental exposures.
"It is fair to state that extensive efforts to find causes of community cancer clusters have not been successful," the paper concluded. "There are fundamental shortcomings to our current methods of investigating community cancer clusters."
The authors cited problems, including failures to consider changes in a community’s population over time and biases in defining the boundary of a suspected cluster, leading to "the overestimation of the disease rate."
"Unfortunately, many states do not have accurate tracking systems, and many do not track the full range of conditions that may be linked to toxic exposure," said Laura B. Hart, a Missouri State University sociology professor who was not involved in the 2012 paper, but wrote a book on the general topic, "Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town."
Hart argued that only long-term studies of large populations can characterize risk assessment from a particular environmental cause with any degree of accuracy. Conservative cutoffs for statistical significance in scientific hypothesis testing is one complication. People being exposed to many carcinogenic compounds over their lifetime from many sources is another.
Asked what she'd tell a frustrated resident, Hart responded that they have a right to a government cancer study and "they would benefit from recognizing that science is really important, but it won’t solve this problem.
"In a context where corporations hold so much power and have shaped the laws that impact community health, residents must play outside the rules," Hart said. "Although this can take a long time, they must put together a strategic plan to demand change through political power."
A potential class action?
Since the state’s cancer study was published in 2013, a wave of litigation alleging the Grumman contamination caused people serious illness and injury has swept through the federal court system.
The most significant case, filed in U.S. Eastern District Court in Central Islip in 2016, seeks to establish a class of tens of thousands of people in the Bethpage area who would be eligible for funds for both medical monitoring and care and compensation for loss of property value. It alleges that residents’ exposure to Grumman contamination came not just from groundwater and soil vapors, but also air emissions.
Northrop Grumman has said the allegations are without merit. A judge in U.S. District Court in Central Islip had been considering motions filed in 2021 and 2022 to certify or reject the classes, a significant step that many similar cases never reach.
Each side commissioned numerous medical and environmental experts to make their arguments and filed exhibits totaling several thousand pages. Class-action cases seeking medical monitoring funds typically require a lower burden than personal injury classes, needing only to prove an increased risk of harm within a certain group or geographical boundary.
In a sign of the case’s stakes, Magistrate Judge Steven Tiscione this year stayed the pending class certification motions and appointed a neutral monitor to negotiate a potential global settlement.
As of May, the parties reported having three mediation sessions, with three more planned. The next update is scheduled for September.
Plaintiff attorney Robert Gitelman, of the Melville- and Manhattan-based personal injury firm Napoli Shkolnik, said there are upward of 2,300 potential clients in and around Bethpage between class representatives and all the individual personal-injury cases. Nearly 500 people have filed personal injury claims, he said.
"People call every day, especially after all of these drum findings," Gitelman told Newsday.
Of the level of health studies conducted to date in Bethpage, he said: "I don’t think it’s been fully fleshed out, and I think it’s swept under the rug."
Clary, the state health department spokeswoman, said the department "does not . . . perform health studies based upon such litigation."
Northrop Grumman has not publicly disclosed how much money it believes it may have to pay in a settlement or judgment.
"We cannot at this time predict or reasonably estimate the potential cumulative outcomes or ranges of possible liability of these Bethpage lawsuits," Northrop Grumman wrote in its most recent annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
'Deserves to be heard'
Even for people not eligible to join the litigation, news of the buried chemical drums brought back questions about loved ones’ deaths — not just 20 years ago, but in one case, even 60 years prior.
Christine Fischette, 69, of Smithtown, grew up on Sycamore Avenue in Bethpage, only a few hundred feet from the future park where chemicals were dumped and drums buried.
She lost her younger sister, Cynthia, at age 4 to a brain tumor in 1961, the year before Grumman gifted that land to the town for Bethpage Community Park. The ballfield that was built over an "open pit" for TCE-soaked rags was directly on the other side of the fence from where Sycamore crosses with what's known as Bethpage's "Number Streets."
At least two other young children within a block or two of her house died of brain tumors around the same time, Fischette said, still recalling their full names and addresses. She said she was "infuriated" to hear that drums had been beneath the ground for decades without the apparent knowledge or disclosure from anyone in a position of authority.
Christine Fischette at her Smithtown home with a photograph of her sister Cynthia, who died of a brain tumor at age 4 in 1961. Credit: Newsday/John Paraskevas
"The drums that were encased in cement. That really hit home," Fischette said in an interview. "Then to donate that land to make a park for children to play on?"
Jim Ostrowski’s daughter, Jessica, was 14 when her mother, Barbara, died in 2002, after a several-year battle with cancer.
Now 36, Jessica Ostrowski is engaged to be married next month. She says she often thinks of her mother, who put on elaborate circus fairs for her preschool students and taught them how to sign "I love you" to their families.
Jessica Ostrowski was 14 when she lost her mother to breast cancer. Credit: Randee Daddona
Whether Grumman contamination had anything to do with her mother's cancer, it also has always been at the front of her mind.
"Every time I hear another [cancer diagnosis from Bethpage]: someone my age, someone else's parent, someone else younger," Jessica Ostrowski said. "So seeing people in hazmat suits handle, essentially, containers in a tomb — I really hate to put emotion into it and say it got me angry. But it got me angry."
She said she supports the type of cancer study that would encompass more or all of Bethpage, with an effort to find multiple generations of current and former residents and their health histories.
"Nothing's going to change the trajectory of our lives. But at least we’d be given the opportunity to have our voice," Jessica Ostrowski said. "And you know what? My mom deserves to be heard."
Paul LaRocco is a reporter on the investigations desk. Since starting at Newsday in late 2010, he has also covered Nassau and Suffolk county politics and government and the Town of Oyster Bay.
