Grumman's cleanup in Bethpage: Residents spending millions on legal fight

Matthew Sherwood measures the cost of Bethpage Community Park contamination in missed opportunities.

The 41-year-old investment manager, who is blind and walks with a guide dog, said the park four blocks from his home "could be a safe place" to take his 3-year-old daughter to — if much of it wasn’t a fenced-off plot of tainted soil.

"It's frustrating hearing stories from others using it when they were a kid: ‘A family place;’ ‘A beautiful park,’ " said Sherwood, a Bethpage resident since 2016. "It’s just sad we have to miss out on that, and for, really, a shameful reason."

A generation after pollution first shuttered the park’s ballfield — and a decade after the state finalized a cleanup plan — fighting between the town that owns the land and the company responsible for the mess has stalled progress, eroded community patience and escalated the cost for residents, beyond just missed opportunities.

The Town of Oyster Bay has paid outside lawyers $3.7 million over the last five years as it pushes Northrop Grumman to conduct a more expansive park cleanup than state environmental regulators require, records obtained by Newsday show. About $1.8 million has been paid since September 2023, when the town sued the corporate successor to Grumman Aerospace over the project’s pace and scope.

Oyster Bay’s largest single payment to Washington, D.C.-based firm ArentFox Schiff, $546,686 in July, followed the March discovery of toxic chemical drums under the ballfield area. Since then, the town, Northrop Grumman and the state Department of Environmental Conservation have traded blame for delays through a series of letters.

Once a span of open space for Little Leaguers and skateboarders, half of Bethpage Community Park has become a perpetual hazmat zone, hidden behind 8-foot wooden fencing with just enough openings to see an array of orange construction cones marking chemical vapor extraction wells. The old ballfield dugouts were razed a few years ago, but rusted light towers, trapped in vines, still loom overhead. A large parking lot separates the area from an indoor ice skating rink, town offices and an outdoor swimming pool, the last vestige of the original facility that opened in 1965.

On most days, it's hard to find the typical hallmarks of a public gathering place, as officials spar over the next steps following the unearthing of the 22 concrete-encased drums filled with dangerous chemical solvents and heavy metals.

DEC leaders this fall accused the town of refusing to negotiate with Northrop Grumman to advance the soil cleanup, which originally covered just four acres of the 18-acre park. The town said it wanted a better plan from the company to investigate nearly all of the facility for previously unknown contamination or buried objects, well beyond the Grumman dumping grounds-turned-ballfield that also contributed to a spreading plume of groundwater pollution.

Lawyers for Oyster Bay on Nov. 11 filed a request in federal court to bar Northrop Grumman from reusing any of the soil it dug up to remove the first set of buried drums, or will dig up as part of the latest objects investigation. They said they worry the soil hasn't been newly tested for all known contaminants, specifically hexavalent chromium, which Grumman used at its old manufacturing facility and disposed, among other metals and chemicals, for decades before donating the land to Oyster Bay.

The materials, once used to coat and clean airplane parts, are classified by federal health officials as carcinogens. They are also central to a pending class-action lawsuit alleging that Grumman's operations contributed to residents' cancers and other illnesses.

The town said in a letter to Grumman dated Monday that contractors for the company abruptly halted plans to investigate the park for more drums, citing the injunction request.

In a statement Wednesday, Oyster Bay Supervisor Joseph Saladino said the town this week "had productive dialogue" with state and federal environmental officials, "a step toward our goal of cleaning up the park to higher standards than originally proposed by Grumman."

Northrop Grumman representatives didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

Both parties know what needs to be done, but getting them to work together is difficult.

—Bill Pavone, co-chair of the Navy/Grumman Community Participation Working Group

Credit: Newsday/ Alejandra Villa Loarca

"Both parties know what needs to be done, but getting them to work together is difficult," said Bill Pavone, co-chair of the Navy/Grumman Community Participation Working Group, a newly formed panel to aid communications on the park cleanup and the larger groundwater remediation in progress.

"Residents don't care about letters and lawsuits," Pavone said.

'No idea how long it will take'

This dispute comes down to whether Northrop Grumman should abide by the terms of the 2013 plan negotiated by the DEC to remediate toxic polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, from the park soil, or agree to the town’s request for expanded testing and a deeper, costlier excavation that doesn’t rebury any soil on site. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must approve a PCB removal plan, but an application can’t be submitted until Oyster Bay and Grumman come to an agreement.

In a plan submitted to regulators in late September, Northrop Grumman estimated that PCB removal could be completed by 2028. The company still would then have to design and build a new ballfield facility and green space before returning an area off-limits to the public since 2002.

"We have no idea how long it will take to building [sic] a ballfield, stadium seating and install all the new park amenities," Ed Hannon, a Grumman project manager, acknowledged in a May email to DEC officials, obtained by Newsday in a public records request.

Grumman argues that the 2013 cleanup plan protects public health and the environment and meets all state and federal standards required for the park to be safely used. The area of contamination has consistently widened throughout the years. It now includes areas beyond the old ballfield and into the adjacent parking lot.

The company has consistently held that the general depth of excavation doesn’t need to change.

Town officials say excavating the park’s soil as deep as 40 feet to allow for any future use of the land would not only fully remove PCBs, as required. It would also, they argue, better address other contaminants that were subject to less-strict state and federal standards a decade ago. Sticking to the current plan, according to the town, would increase the chance that the site would need to be opened in the future, at taxpayers’ expense.

The state previously said such a cleanup would only be needed if anyone ever planned to "grow food for human consumption" on the land. PCBs are among "forever chemicals" that don't easily break down or dissipate over time.

Upon filing of the 2013 cleanup plan, the DEC estimated its total cost to the company at $81 million. That included containment systems for groundwater pollution and the thermal wells to heat and remove volatile organic compounds from the soil before PCBs.

The DEC did not provide Newsday with a new estimate of the total cleanup cost, given the years of delays and discoveries of widening contamination. State officials noted, however, that Grumman has paid the agency $628,399 to cover its oversight costs over the years of park cleanup.

"The state's cleanup efforts aim to safeguard public health, the Island's vital water sources, and our environment from potential contamination and to restore the park as a vital community asset as swiftly as possible," the DEC said in a statement.

Katrina F. Kuh, a professor of environmental law at Pace University’s Elisabeth Haub School of Law in White Plains, previously handled environmental regulatory cases for a large law firm. She said it isn’t surprising that people with a vested interest in a polluted site would want a cleanup more stringent than what a polluter and regulator formally agreed to.

"It is very, very common for communities … local governments and environmental groups to advocate for more protective remedies" than regulators' selection she wrote in an email.

Climate of distrust

Oyster Bay filed its lawsuit against Northrop Grumman in 2023. But this year’s events have been the driver of town legal fees and increased distrust between the sides.

On March 22, as contractors installed wells for the latest phase of the ballfield soil heating treatment, excavators pierced what turned out to be the first of the drums' concrete encasements. Richard Lenz, the town public works commissioner, recalled receiving a phone call from Hannon alerting him to the "obstruction," as it was initially characterized.

A week later, Hannon emailed Lenz to confirm the find as leading to discovery of the first set of drums stacked beneath the soil. Grumman had used the area, before its donation to Oyster Bay in 1962, to dump rags soaked with carcinogenic solvents used in aircraft manufacturing and to dry wastewater sludges of the toxic metals.

Northrop Grumman had already notified the DEC of the drums discovery, but on the advice of attorneys for Oyster Bay, Lenz called the EPA’s National Response Center hotline for reporting oil and chemical spills.

An unknown operator filled out a state spill report form, memorializing, misspellings and all, the lack of trust between the town and Grumman: "THE CALLER IS REPORTING A DUMPING OF MULTIPLE RED 55 GALLONS DRUMS THAT WERE BERRIED [sic] AT AN UNKNOWN TIME AT THE CONSTRUCTION SITE."

"THE CALLER IS REPORTING A DUMPING OF MULTIPLE RED 55 GALLONS DRUMS THAT WERE BERRIED [sic] AT AN UNKNOWN TIME AT THE CONSTRUCTION SITE." —State spill report.

Lenz's reasoning for making the report? It would trigger an automatic response from health, environmental and public safety agencies at all levels of government, ensuring wider knowledge of the drums.

"They always want to keep things under control and not let the outside world know what’s happening," Lenz told Newsday.

Town vs. Grumman and DEC

In April then-DEC commissioner Basil Seggos issued a public letter "calling upon Northrop Grumman to enhance cleanup efforts already underway" by pledging to dispose PCB-contaminated soil off site rather than reburying it at the park, as the 2013 plan allows.

Hannon suggested to a DEC official in an email that he understood the reason for Seggos’ letter, but put the onus on the DEC for not getting their PCB cleanup plan in front of the EPA.

"Northrop Grumman has repeatedly requested the EPA allow us to clean up the PCBs outside the ballfield and the EPA has repeatedly denied us permission," he wrote. "Will DEC obtain EPA approval?"

"Northrop Grumman has repeatedly requested the EPA allow us to clean up the PCBs outside the ballfield and the EPA has repeatedly denied us permission. Will DEC obtain EPA approval?"—Email to DEC

Stephen McBay, a spokesman for the EPA’s regional office including New York, declined to comment on the park dispute, but said in a statement that the agency "will continue to coordinate with the NYSDEC to help inform an approach for the PCB cleanup of Bethpage Community Park that is in accordance with federal requirements."

By late September, interim DEC commissioner Sean Mahar had written the letter that blamed Oyster Bay for holding up negotiations over the EPA application. He called it "critical" that the town "expedite its engagement" in talks with the company over any soil excavation "above what is legally required under the [2013 cleanup plan] in order to keep this project on track."

Shortly after, the town said it would resume meetings with Northrop Grumman since the company submitted a plan to investigate a larger area of the park for more contamination.

But the dispute flared up again last month when the town said Grumman’s plan had "fundamental flaws and deficiencies." The town board approved issuing bids to hire a company to drill soil borings that would allow the town to conduct its own investigation if they aren’t satisfied with what the DEC approves.

Town officials have criticized the DEC for — despite Seggos' order for an ultimate soil removal — allowing Northrop Grumman to temporarily leave the contaminated soil it displaced earlier this year to remove the drums, but said Wednesday that the agency was working with them to address concerns.

'Shouldn't be waiting'

No matter who deserves more blame, residents have had enough of the infighting.

"There hasn't been enough transparency regarding the delays and the reasons behind them," said Michael Costa, 44, a lifelong Bethpage resident. "Clear communication from the town or state could help alleviate a lot of these concerns."

Authorities say the delays, including from the chemical drums discovery, have not had any adverse environmental impacts and pose no health risks to residents. But for a community that has always suspected a link between historical Grumman dumping and their health, concern remains.

This summer, after pressure from local lawmakers, the state Department of Health reversed course and announced it would conduct a new study of cancer cases in Bethpage to determine if there are any unusual patterns.

The sole previous study, from 2013, found no higher overall rates of cancer but was limited to a 19-block range.

Whether the current delays have impacted or will ever impact public health, the officials bickering over the project "shouldn’t be waiting," Costa said.

Sherwood, who lives barely a quarter mile from Bethpage Community Park, said he knows the public drinking water supply in town has long been treated to remove plume chemicals, and that there's likely no immediate health risk from old contamination in the park's soil.

"But," he said, "who knows what could happen if it continues to not be cleaned up?"

With Joseph Ostapiuk

By Paul LaRocco

paul.larocco@newsday.com@paullarocco

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.