State DEC approves soil sample plan for Bethpage Community Park, but legal battle persists

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation approved Northrop Grumman's plan to investigate soil contamination at a portion of Bethpage Community Park, but Oyster Bay Town and company officials are still waging a bitter legal battle over the pace and scope of the cleanup.

Northrop Grumman contractors must sample the soil to determine the extent of contamination at the 18-acre property, where for years its corporate predecessor, Grumman Aerospace, had disposed of toxic chemicals. Once the sampling is finished, Northrop Grumman and Oyster Bay must agree to a plan for remediating polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, at the property. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency needs to sign off on the PCB cleanup. 

The first phase of soil sampling started this week and will cover the park's playground and pool areas. The work is expected to wrap up by May 1, according to town and state officials. A second phase will focus on soil in the cordoned-off ballfield area. The DEC has yet to approve plans for sampling soil in that portion of the park.

The DEC late last year urged Northrop Grumman to file a more extensive soil sampling plan for the entire park property, where one year ago contractors dug up 22 concrete-encased drums containing toxic chemicals.

The DEC had urged Northrop Grumman in a Nov. 27 letter to include options in their sampling plan for reaching the highest level of cleanup, known as "unrestricted use." The agency also had asked Northrop Grumman to test for hexavalent chromium, a carcinogenic metal used in industrial operations. Oyster Bay Supervisor Joseph Saladino supported the DEC's letter, telling Newsday in December it had marked an "enormous shift" in the agency's approach to the cleanup.

“The approval of this Work Plan is a significant milestone in the cleanup at the Former Grumman Settling Ponds,” Sarah Johnston, a DEC project manager, wrote in a March 21 letter to Northrop Grumman.

Saladino, in an interview Wednesday, said cleanup efforts have fallen short in the year since the drums were discovered.

"We're doing everything in our power to keep the momentum rolling on the cleanup, but the cleanup that they have been proposing and undertaking is far less than thorough," he said of Northrop Grumman.

Northrop Grumman did not respond to a request for comment.

Johnston said in the letter the DEC wants “to ensure the work is completed efficiently and expeditiously as possible.” The second phase of soil sampling is expected to start once the first phase   has finished, according to the DEC.

Bitter legal battle

Grumman Aerospace donated the land where the park is to the Town of Oyster Bay in 1962. Officials discovered contamination there in 2002, forcing the closure of the ballfields. 

In September, the DEC launched a thermal remediation process at the site to remove volatile organic compounds from within the soil. The agency said that as of Feb. 19, 380 wells dug into the ground had extracted 277 pounds of contamination. That followed an earlier round of thermal remediation at the park from August 2020 to May 2022, Newsday has reported.

Oyster Bay and Northrop Grumman remain divided over other elements of the cleanup.

In a March 14 court filing, a lawyer representing the Town of Oyster Bay said the two sides were “at an impasse” over discovery demands. 

Town officials are seeking decades-old records indicating the chemicals Grumman purchased and used when the company operated out of Bethpage. With access to the purchase orders, Oyster Bay officials hope to gain insight into the extent of pollution at the property.

"The Park was Grumman's landfill," wrote Russell Selman of the law firm ArentFox Schiff LLP, which is representing the town and has offices in Chicago. "The Town seeks purchase records to establish how much of each chemical Grumman purchased, and therefore approximately how much of each it disposed at the Park."

Kayley McGrath, an attorney representing Northrop Grumman for the Manhattan law firm Sive, Paget & Riesel PC, said in a March 18 letter that the court should reject Oyster Bay's request. The company would have to "produce hundreds of thousands of irrelevant records spanning decades at the tail end of this already extremely long-lived case," McGrath wrote. Those records are "not a proxy" for what Northrop Grumman dumped at the park, she wrote.

There are about 194 "bankers boxes" containing "hard copy documents, and hundreds of thousands of emails and electronic documents" that are "potentially responsive" to the town's request, according to a footnote in the filing.

The town also wants to compel Northrop Grumman to ship soil it is excavating off Long Island. The company says it plans to rebury that soil on park grounds. 

That request threatens to "delay comprehensive data gap sampling, the next critical step in the court process," lawyers for Northrop Grumman wrote in a letter dated Feb. 20.

Underground investigation unfinished 

In late March of last year, a Northrop Grumman contractor discovered six concrete-encased chemical drums while digging a well for a filtration system. In the weeks that followed, officials found a total of 22 drums. Those drums did not leak, officials have said. They contained toxic chemicals similar to what has been found in the surrounding soil.

New electromagnetic scans of the ballfield area were completed in October, according to the state DEC. State officials say they've been waiting for the results of that testing to guide the search for more underground objects.

Jack Delaney, a longtime Bethpage resident, said he’s been frustrated with the lack of progress at the park.

“It’s very disappointing,” Delaney said. “It’s a community park that our tax dollars are going into, and we’re getting nothing in return.”

By Joseph Ostapiuk

joseph.ostapiuk@newsday.com@OstapiukJ