Oyster Bay to sue Northrop Grumman over cleanup at Bethpage park

The Town of Oyster Bay plans to file suit against Northrop Grumman, arguing the aerospace giant is refusing to fully remove toxic compounds from the soil at Bethpage Community Park, which for decades served as a company chemical waste disposal site.

Attorneys for the town sent a notice of claim last week disclosing plans to file a federal civil suit against Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. to force the company to perform a more thorough cleanup of the 3½ acre property, which has been closed since 2002.

"After 10 years of misleading and inadequate cleanup efforts by Grumman and failed oversight by DEC, [Town of Oyster Bay] must commence a civil action to protect its rights as property owner and to protect the community neighboring and using the park from the threat posed by Grumman’s current cleanup efforts," the letter said.

Oyster Bay Town Supervisor Joseph Saladino said the park is undoubtedly a contributing factor to the 4.3-mile Bethpage plume, which is composed of two dozen contaminants, including multiple carcinogens. 

"If you know it's contributing to the plume, and you know the plume is migrating and getting bigger, why on Earth would you fight us on removing these contaminants," Saladino said Tuesday. "It makes no scientific sense. And it certainly doesn't make sense in terms of protecting the public and protecting the groundwater from further contamination."

Saladino wrote to Grumman President and Chief Executive Kathy Warden on Tuesday asking her to intervene in the dispute.

Decades-long home to aerospace

From the 1930s through the 1990s, the 600-acre Grumman facility in Bethpage was home to aerospace manufacturing, research and testing, including the Apollo moon lander and military aircraft.

In 1962, Grumman donated the 18 acres that would become Bethpage Community Park to the town. It wasn’t widely disclosed until 2002 that a portion of the land — where ballfields were built — had been the company’s chemical waste disposal site. Both the company and the U.S. Navy, which owned 105 acres of the site, are responsible for cleaning up the region's larger area of groundwater pollution.

Grumman’s responsibility to clean up the park was detailed in a 2013 agreement with the state. 

Oyster Bay wants Grumman to employ the highest level of remediation — unrestricted use — to clean the park, which is also home to a pool, ice skating rink, skate park and playground.

The State Department of Environmental Conservation, which is supervising the cleanup of volatile organic compounds at the park, insists that cleaning the property to the less stringent “restricted residential” use is consistent with recreational uses such as public parks.

Grumman did not respond to requests for comment. 

The DEC in a statement said that "significant progress has been made in addressing the legacy contamination at the park and DEC is committed to ensuring the responsible parties conduct an effective cleanup in as expeditious a manner as possible so Bethpage residents can once again enjoy the park … Based on the ongoing collection of data, the state’s cleanup plan is effective and will provide full protection from contamination from the site’s past use."

A history of deception

In recent years, the park has come to epitomize the corporate and regulatory failures that created the larger groundwater contamination now spreading beneath Bethpage and surrounding communities.

Newsday highlighted the site in its 2020 investigation, "The Grumman Plume: Decades of Deceit," which detailed a history of deceptive statements, missteps and minimization that slowed the cleanup of Long Island’s most intractable environmental crisis.

In 2020, Grumman began a long-delayed thermal heating process, which removed 1,400 pounds of soil contamination from the ballfields, state officials said. Additional contamination was discovered during the process in an adjacent parking lot, further delaying cleanup efforts.

By January, the state and Grumman expect to begin the second round of thermal remediation of the ballfields, in which the soil is heated through more than 200 wells to release and collect volatile organic compounds, which include the carcinogenic solvent trichloroethylene, or TCE. That process should be finished by mid-2023, followed by rounds of testing, officials said.

Work is also expected to begin in 2024 on excavating elevated levels of toxic metals and the industrial compound polychlorinated biphenyl, known as PCB, from the park's soil.

The town claims Grumman has failed to obtain mandated approval from the Environmental Protection Agency regarding its plan to remove PCBs, in violation of the Toxic Substances Control Act.

In a recent report, the EPA indicated that Grumman had failed to adequately characterize the location of the PCBs and where those chemicals could migrate. The EPA, which declined to comment, citing the pending litigation, instructed Grumman to provide significantly more data before it will evaluate plan, records show.

"Grumman wants to leave everything in place and turn the park into a de facto PCB landfill," said Chicago-based attorney Russell Selman, who represents Oyster Bay. " … That's a wrong legally and it's wrong ethically."

It remains unclear how the lawsuit could effect the state's time frame for completing the remediation. In October, DEC officials told Newsday the work could be complete as early as 2025, three years later than originally projected.

"It is not our intention to slow down the work at all," Saladino said. "This is about getting it fully remediated. And … removal of the soil is both the fastest and the most efficient path to fully remediating the park."

By Robert Brodsky

robert.brodsky@newsday.com@BrodskyRobert

Robert Brodsky is a breaking news reporter who has worked at Newsday since 2011. He is a Queens College and American University alum.