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For many years, Grumman, the Bethpage aerospace giant, knew its toxic chemicals were contaminating area groundwater, but kept critical information from the public as it avoided culpability and many cleanup costs, a Newsday investigation has found.

This behavior, newly revealed in confidential company documents, was long enabled by regulators who downplayed the pollution and did little to contain its spread from Grumman’s facility to the larger community and, now, to neighboring towns.

At 4.3 miles-long, 2.1-miles-wide and as much as 900-feet deep, the plume is among the most complex and significant of its kind nationwide. An agglomeration of two dozen contaminants, it includes multiple carcinogens, most significantly the potent metal degreaser trichloroethylene, or TCE, which is in pre-treated water at levels thousands of times above state drinking standards.

The solvent most infamously poisoned the water supply in Woburn, Mass., in the 1980s, causing a childhood leukemia cluster and prompting the successful litigation depicted in the book and film, “A Civil Action.”

Grumman relied on TCE to clean aircraft parts for 40 years, but at its peak obscured or outright denied its use. The company released so much of the chemical into the ground that its own environmental manager later wrote to a colleague that the thought “caused my insides to start churnin’ somethin’ fierce!!”

Public water providers in and around Bethpage have spent more than $80 million to cleanse their water within the plume. They cite consistent sampling that shows what’s delivered to taps meets all state and federal drinking standards, but wary consumers still clear bottled water from supermarket shelves, especially as other potential health risks, such as radium and the industrial stabilizer 1,4-dioxane, a likely carcinogen, are identified.

Email between environmental manager and colleague

From: Smith, Kent A.

Sent: March 15, 2011

To: Cofman, John

Subject: RE: How Much TCE Spilled? Perspective

Perspective? How’s this for perspective? The fact that there might have been a total release of 40,000 gallons of TCE just caused my insides to start churnin’ somethin’ fierce!!

Man, oh man, that’s a lot of material

From: Cofman, John

Sent: March 16, 2011

To: Smith, Kent A (AS)

Subject: RE: How Much TCE Spilled? Perspective

Yes — I was stunned when looking at this.

Read the emails

The nine-month Newsday investigation, built on thousands of pages of records and scores of interviews, found numerous points over the last 45 years that the pollution from Grumman could have been addressed more aggressively. But instead of candor and decisiveness, obfuscation, and foot dragging took hold – not only by Grumman, but also at first by Nassau County and, until recently, the state Department of Environmental Conservation, the lead regulatory agency.

The consequences have been measurable.

When the county in 1986 first identified the migrating contaminants as a plume, it was two-miles long, one-mile-wide, up to 500-feet deep and yet to cross Hempstead Turnpike. In doubling in size, it has crossed the Southern State Parkway and moves, a foot per day, toward the Great South Bay, the centerpiece of Long Island’s estuaries.

After years of inaction, the state has approved a $585 million plan to finally fully contain and remediate the plume, with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo saying it will fall to the polluters to do the work or face litigation aimed at recovering the costs. If that fails, the state would pay for the project itself.

Under New York’s “Superfund” program, Grumman, now Northrop Grumman, shares cleanup responsibility with the U.S. Navy, owner of a sixth of the once-600-plus-acre Bethpage complex.

What Grumman knew

Beyond the fact that Grumman fully operated the site, its behavior stands out from the Navy’s because of how it contrasts with the corporation’s paternal presence in the era when it was Long Island’s economic engine. It employed more than 20,000 people and was revered for building World War II fighters and the space module that took Neil Armstrong to the moon.

Before its 1994 acquisition by Northrop Corp. greatly diminished its jobs and presence in the community, Grumman all but defined Bethpage. One French restaurant got so much business from company executives it was dubbed “Grumman’s annex.” Schools would stagger dismissals to avoid the traffic crush from the plants’ day shift letting out.

Northrop Grumman now holds nine acres, and employs about 500 people, in Bethpage.

Many of the starkest examples of what Grumman knew about the pollution it caused, but did not share publicly, were found in a series of exhibits and decisions in sparsely-covered federal lawsuits filed in 2012 and 2016. Grumman’s primary insurer during the 1970s and ‘80s, The Travelers Companies, argued successfully that it has no duty to cover potential liabilities for the company’s past practices in part because Grumman had not provided it with full or timely notice about its role in the pollution.

In 2014, U.S. District Court Judge Katherine B. Forrest wrote, “Grumman’s own documents, and its admissions in reply to Travelers’ [motion] are clear that its long-term, historical practices created contamination.”

Last year 2019, Judge Lorna G. Schofield separately ruled: “no reasonable jury could conclude,” even in the ‘70s, that “Grumman lacked sufficient information” to know its pollution could open it to damages.

Grumman’s own documents, and its admissions… are clear that its long-term, historical practices created contamination.

During the first case, telling documents emerged that were never meant to be seen. Nearly every exhibit submitted by Northrop Grumman and Travelers was filed under seal, as were those submitted by another party, Century Indemnity Company, a successor to Grumman’s insurer during the 1950s and 1960s.

But Newsday discovered that 23 of the 42 exhibits Century offered in support of one critical motion — all marked “confidential” – had not been sealed as intended and were available on a court records website with the notation “FILING ERROR – DEFICIENT DOCKET ENTRY.”

Together with historical news articles and decades of official correspondence received by Newsday under state and federal Freedom of Information laws, the secret documents reveal what the company knew, when it knew it, and what was withheld from the public.

As early as 1955, for example, the state determined that Grumman’s toxic wastes, then identified as chromium and other heavy metals, could “concentrate as slugs or ribbons which might eventually contaminate the water in public supply wells at a considerable distance.”

In 1976, Grumman’s environmental consultant concluded in a private memo that “basins, lagoons, spills, etc. have created a slug of contaminated ground water in the shallow aquifer underlying at least part of the plant.”

Through it all, Grumman insisted that it had no knowledge it was the source of much of the underground mass. It maintained the public position into the 1990s, even as it continued receiving similar information, internally and from government agencies.

The company also allowed regulators to create a false narrative that a nearby manufacturer – responsible for another toxic chemical found at lower levels – was the primary cause of its pollutants. It would take decades to undo that perception.

In her 2014 decision, Forrest discredited Northrop Grumman’s argument that Grumman initially thought it wasn’t to blame, writing: “a belief in non-liability was unreasonable based on the factual record.”

‘Complete and utter failure’

More recently the company, with the state’s help, moved from denial to persistently minimizing the problem and dodging costs.

In the 1990s, a Northrop Grumman consultant developed a computer model used by the state that grossly underestimated how the plume would grow. Notably, it predicted that the toxic contamination wouldn’t spread to additional public water supply wells beyond Bethpage in the next 30 years. Within a decade wells that serve South Farmingdale, Levittown and North Wantagh were hit.

It also predicted that, through treatment and natural processes, a TCE-contaminated well in Bethpage would be cleaned to state drinking water standards of 5 parts per billion by 2012. The average TCE concentration was 83 parts per billion in 2012 and 349 last year 2019.

Until the federal government intervened and put its use to a halt, the state relied on that faulty model to issue limited, less-expensive cleanup plans that failed to contain the plume.

It illustrated that it often acted as Grumman’s ally in minimizing the extent of the pollution and what was needed to fight it.

At the start of the cleanup, in 1990, the it dismissed calls to tackle the off-site groundwater pollution, saying it “would be a waste of time and money.”

Positions like that, compounded over time, have helped Virginia-based Northrop Grumman avoid numerous costs for cleaning the region’s contaminated water and soil. Many were instead borne by local taxpayers.

“Everyone involved should be ashamed to admit that this plume has been known about since the 1970s, and 40 years later, it is bigger, deeper and worse than ever,” district superintendent Michael Boufis told state lawmakers at a 2016 hearing. “A complete and utter failure of the system.”

Hundreds of millions spent

Northrop Grumman declined multiple requests for sit-down interviews.

In written statements, the company and the Navy each highlighted a range of cleanup measures they’ve engaged in over the last 30 years, which they claim have cost about $300 million combined.

Tim Paynter, a Northrop Grumman spokesman, wrote, “For over two decades of environmental remediation efforts in Bethpage, Northrop Grumman has worked closely and extensively with New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, the United States Navy, the New York State Department of Health, and other federal, state and local regulatory authorities to develop and implement scientifically sound remediation strategies that protect human health and the environment. Northrop Grumman’s commitment to remediation in Bethpage is an important aspect of its ongoing legacy.”

The company has repeatedly defended its waste disposal practices as legal at the time, although the Superund process holds polluters responsible for costs nonetheless. In terms of clean-up, it touts, in particular, a long-running containment well system along the boundary of Grumman’s former property that has extracted nearly 200,000 pounds of groundwater contaminants.

“We cut off that offsite migration,” Ed Hannon, a Northrop Grumman project manager, told residents at a January 2020 public hearing.

But approximately 200,000 more pounds of toxic chemicals still await removal beyond the original grounds, according to the state. After a decade of planning and construction, the company is still completing its first comprehensive off-site system to remove plume contaminants before they reach drinking wells, joining one that the Navy operates and another it is planning.

Northrop Grumman said it has spent $200 million on the plume, but unlike the Navy, refused to break down that cost. Critics contend it is inflated by payments to lawyers and consultants that have helped it stall and avoid cleanup responsibility.

The Navy since 1995 has contributed more than $40 million to public water supply treatments in Bethpage, Levittown and South Farmingdale, compared to about $3.6 million paid by Grumman/Northrop Grumman.

“The Navy is focused on fulfilling its responsibility to protect human health and the environment, and we take our role in these clean-up efforts seriously,” a Navy spokesman, J.C. Kreidel, said in a statement when asked about the difference in contributions.

Northrop Grumman cites these existing treatments – specifically officials’ reassurances that they make the area’s drinking water safe – to argue that a more extensive cleanup is unnecessary. Water providers call that argument specious because it leaves the burden to them and their ratepayers. Environmentalists also note that it’s unknown how the various contaminants in the toxic mix react with each other, what new ones will emerge, such as the likely carcinogen 1,4-dioxane that can’t be removed by traditional treatment, and what happens when all of this hits the Great South Bay.

The ire in the community continues unabated, and a review of Grumman’s legacy over more than 50 years shows why.

In the early 1960s the company donated 18 acres of land to the Town of Oyster Bay for what became Bethpage Community Park. It had used several acres of it as a dump site for toxic sludge and solvent-soaked rags. In 2002, seven years after the state had dismissed the park as a pollution concern, it was closed because of soil contamination.

The park’s ballfield, built directly over the rag pit, remains closed.

But the problem turned out to be worse than just soil. In 2007, the Bethpage Water District found that the park – specifically the ballfield – was also the source of the highest levels yet detected of TCE-tainted groundwater.

It asked Northrop Grumman to pay it millions of dollars for upgraded treatment and wound up in protracted negotiations. When the district finally sued the company in 2013, the case was tossed because it had missed the three-year legal window to bring a claim.

Bethpage residents, who are increasingly joining class action lawsuits, have become consumed by suspicions that the cancers afflicting their family members, neighbors and themselves can be traced to the pollution, despite a lack of conclusive studies.

Property values around town are also of such concern that realtors sometimes call the water district superintendent to open houses to assure prospective buyers of the water’s safety.

Pamela Carlucci, 68, a cancer survivor who has lived in Bethpage for 43 years, encapsulated the feelings that many in her community have of the polluters, regulators and water providers alike: “Should we trust them?”

Moments of consequence

The story of the pollution plaguing Bethpage is marked by many failures, but underpinning them all is that the public wasn’t told the truth when the problem was first emerging.

That left tens of thousands of people in the dark about something that deeply affected their lives and to this day has created widespread distrust.

Below are five of the most telling examples of this deceit, all from the documents meant to be kept secret and discovered during the Newsday investigation.

They have been culled from “The Making of an Environmental Disaster,” which will appear tomorrow and presents the full, seven-decade narrative of how the contamination came to be and grow to such avoidable proportions.

As much as they reveal on their own, these examples stand out even more in the context of that chronicle.

1. ‘CONTAMINATION MAY SPREAD’

In June 1976, Grumman’s environmental consultants, Geraghty & Miller, presented the company with the confidential memo that identified pollution problems as caused by the plant’s “basins, lagoons, spills, etc.”

But just as significantly, it predicted, in prescient terms, that the groundwater contamination, which had already shut several of Grumman’s private drinking water wells, “may spread both laterally and vertically beneath the property;” that “neighboring wells may become contaminated over the long term;” and that “further contamination may take place from sources presently not detected.”

“If they had done their job in ’76, when they knew about the polluted wells, we wouldn’t be here today,” said John Sullivan, chairman of Bethpage Water District’s board of commissioners.

Grumman didn’t tell employees or the public of these findings. The problem would only surface a half-year later because an alarmed state official with access to Bethpage water sampling results called an Albany newspaper.

2. ‘I’D DRINK THE WATER’

On Dec. 2, 1976, the Bethpage Water District shut down the first of its public supply wells because of TCE contamination of 60 parts per billion, above the state standard of 50 that would be set in 1977 – and 12 times today’s of 5. County Health Commissioner John Dowling told Newsday, “If I lived in the area, I would continue to drink the water. We don’t have any information that the chemicals are harmful in drinking water.”

That same day Dowling had been present for an ominous private warning about the water. He was among the officials who met with Grumman representatives, according to a memo that was among the meant-to-be-sealed Century Insurance documents. The memo included confidential handwritten notes to Grumman by Geraghty & Miller that recorded a sharp disagreement between the federal Environmental Protection Agency and a representative of the state Department of Environmental Conservation:

EPA — “Don’t drink the water”

State [illegible] disagrees

EPA — “no basis for levels that are acceptable”

It is unclear how Dowling, who is deceased, could have made his public comment– but no one else in the room alerted the public to those federal concerns, which came on top of the National Cancer Institute reporting that TCE had caused cancer in mice and federal officials moving to limit workplace TCE exposure.

It was only last year, that state officials suggested that levels of TCE in Bethpage public water before late 1976 were high enough to harm people’s health.

3. ANOTHER COMPANY TAKES THE FALL

Faced with the contamination, Nassau and state officials placed almost all the blame at the feet of Hicksville’s Hooker Chemical Company, which operated at a far-smaller site adjacent to Grumman’s western edge.

Privately, the Bethpage Water District had evidence this wasn’t the case and blamed Grumman. In November 1977, it sent the company a letter demanding damages and asserting, “currently available evidence indicates that…contamination has arisen by virtue of discharge of waste products from your company into the ground water supply,” according to Judge Forrest’s insurance case ruling.

But the district never publicized its position.

Instead, a few years later, it blamed only Hooker, with the district’s lawyer at the time telling a Bethpage newspaper that he was sharing, for the first time, “district records of its two-year struggle to force Hooker to pay up to one million dollars for replacement costs” of the TCE-tainted well.

The small water district then had such a collegial relationship with the powerhouse company based in its town that it often preferred to cut deals in private, sometimes over beers.

“It was Grumman and the district coming in and sitting down at a table,” said Richard Humann, a longtime Bethpage Water environmental consultant. “It was ‘What do we need to do?’ ‘Ok, you did this, we’re going to do this, you’re going to do pay this.’ Then they’d shake hands, go out, and it was done.”

4. CHERRY PICKED-DATA

In 1978, Geraghty & Miller privately presented Grumman with results from a 3-day sampling of its industrial wastewaters, in which it attributed the results to company “housekeeping practices” such as spills and equipment cleanup. At 4 p.m., a peak usage time, the samples showed an average of 17 lbs. per day of TCE, according to the confidential report, which was also mistakenly left unsealed.

But when the company published the data few years later as part of a presentation highlighting its concern for the environment, it omitted the 17-pound reading, which was enough to contaminate 292 million gallons of groundwater, according to a court filing by the Century company.

Grumman only presented measures from midnight, 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. two days later that showed an average of between 2 and 6 lbs. per day of TCE in the water.

Included in the presentation was a statement from a Grumman executive that read, “The concerns of Long Island are the concerns of the 20,000 Grummanites who live and work here.”

5. ‘NO QUESTION REGARDING LIABILITY’

Grumman executives, lawyers and insurers huddled in August 1989 to discuss a complaint from the Bethpage Water District, which had privately notified the company that a second of its public wells had been polluted with TCE.

In another memo that was meant to be sealed, a company summary of the meeting offered this blunt summary: “Data is conclusive that it is Grumman plume which is contaminating the [Bethpage] Water Districts [sic] well.” It underscored the point: “No question regarding liability as there are no other direct parties [that] appear to have contributed to contamination yet.”

Yet in March 1990, some of the same Grumman officials present at the 1989 meeting were interviewed by the town’s weekly newspaper, The Bethpage Tribune, for an article headlined, “Rumors of Grumman Contamination Pose No Threat.”

The story, filled with reassuring comments from the executives, included this line: “Grumman doesn’t admit liability on the issue of contaminating Bethpage wells.”

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Grumman, the Bethpage aerospace giant, knew as far back as the mid-1970s that its toxic chemicals were contaminating area groundwater, but it kept secret crucial information that could have helped stop what is now Long Island’s most intractable environmental crisis, a Newsday investigation found.

On numerous occasions, particularly during a critical 15-year period, the company made public statements that directly contradicted the alarming evidence it held, as it avoided culpability and millions in costs.

This behavior was long enabled by government officials who downplayed the pollution and did little to contain its spread from Grumman’s once-600-acre site, through Bethpage and into neighboring communities.

The nine-month Newsday investigation, built on thousands of pages of records and scores of interviews, charts a largely hidden history, one that emerges, most strikingly, in confidential Grumman and government documents revealed for the first time.

They show that the problem could have been addressed more aggressively at many points over the past 45 years. But instead, foot-dragging, resistance and grossly inaccurate projections took hold — not only on the part of the company but also for decades by the state Department of Environmental Conservation, the lead regulatory agency.

The U.S. Navy, which owned a sixth of the Grumman-operated facility, has also often objected to the costliest, most-comprehensive cleanup plans.

Though 4.3 miles long, 2.1 miles wide and as much as 900 feet deep, the plume’s significance is defined by more than size. Unlike most similar masses, it sits in an aquifer that is the only drinking water source for a densely populated region.

As one of the most complex in the nation, it is composed of two dozen contaminants, including multiple carcinogens. Most significant is the potent metal degreaser trichloroethylene, or TCE, which is present in pretreated water at levels thousands of times above state drinking standards.

Grumman relied on TCE to clean aircraft parts for 40 years, but as the chemical was discovered to be spreading from its property, it obscured or outright denied its use. The company released so much of it into the earth that one of its environmental managers later wrote to a colleague, in a newly revealed email, that the thought “caused my insides to start churnin’ somethin’ fierce!!”

A growing number of expensive treatment systems remove TCE and other contaminants from public wells within the plume, including ones serving not only Bethpage, but Plainedge, South Farmingdale, North Massapequa and parts of Levittown, Seaford, Wantagh and Massapequa Park. State and local authorities consistently certify the treated drinking water as safe, but cases of bottled water fly off supermarket shelves and residents’ health concerns, particularly about cancer, are numerous.

The pollution that originated from Grumman is classified as a “significant threat to public health or the environment” under the state’s Superfund program, which aims to clean hazardous waste sites.

“Everyone involved should be ashamed to admit that this plume has been known about since the 1970s, and 40 years later, it is bigger, deeper and worse than ever,” Michael Boufis, superintendent of the Bethpage Water District, told state lawmakers at a 2016 hearing. “A complete and utter failure of the system.”

When Nassau County and the U.S. Geological Survey in 1986 first identified the migrating contaminants as a plume, it was two miles long, one mile wide, up to 500 feet deep and yet to cross Hempstead Turnpike. In doubling in size, it has crossed the Southern State Parkway and moves, at a foot a day, toward the Great South Bay, the centerpiece of Long Island’s estuaries.

Local taxpayers have paid more than $50 million for a portion of the public water treatments and a seven-acre soil cleanup by the Town of Oyster Bay, of which Bethpage is a part. The Navy, which is also responsible for remediation under the Superfund decisions, says it has spent more than $130 million in total, including for some of the public treatments.

Grumman’s successor, Northrop Grumman, says it has spent $200 million, but unlike the Navy it has declined to break down those costs. Critics question whether that figure includes payments to lawyers and consultants, but the company has completed a substantial system of groundwater contaminant extraction wells along its former properties.

How much more will it cost to contain and eliminate the plume?

The state’s comprehensive plan, announced last year, estimates it will take $585 million over the first 30 years alone. Near-total eradication of the contamination wouldn’t come for 110 years.

The plan is a remarkable reversal of the state’s far more cautious approach in decades past. It wants Northrop Grumman and the Navy to fund it or face litigation.

What Grumman knew

Grumman’s role in the crisis contrasts with its paternal community presence in the era when it was Long Island’s economic engine. It employed more than 20,000 people and was revered for building World War II fighters and the space module that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon.

Before its 1994 acquisition by Northrop Corp. greatly diminished its jobs and presence, Grumman all but defined Bethpage. One French restaurant got so much business from its executives it was dubbed “Grumman’s annex.” Schools would stagger dismissals to avoid the traffic crush from the plants’ day shift letting out.

Virginia-based Northrop Grumman now occupies nine acres in Bethpage, employing about 500 people. Corporate offices, distribution centers and a movie soundstage fill the rest of the old site.

Everyone involved should be ashamed to admit that this plume has been known about since the 1970s, and 40 years later, it is bigger, deeper and worse than ever.

Michael Boufis, superintendent of the Bethpage Water District

“A lot of people had a lot of pride working for Grumman,” said Jeanne O’Connor, 49, a fourth-generation Bethpage resident and activist for a stronger cleanup whose mother and grandfather held jobs there. “Now it feels like that image has been severely tainted by the fact that they left this mess.”

Many of the starkest examples of Grumman’s private knowledge were found in a series of exhibits and decisions in sparsely covered federal lawsuits filed in 2012 and 2016. Grumman’s insurer during the 1970s and ’80s, The Travelers Cos., successfully argued that it had no duty to cover liabilities for the company’s past practices in part because Grumman had not provided it with full or timely notice about its role in the pollution.

In her 2014 decision, U.S. District Court Judge Katherine B. Forrest wrote, “Grumman’s own documents, and its admissions in reply to Travelers’ [assertions] are clear that its long-term, historical practices created contamination.”

She rattled off a number of pollution-causing practices that “Grumman knew” of in the period it publicly denied responsibility. They included using TCE in degreasing vats and spray guns, discharging TCE-contaminated water into basins that allowed it to leach into the ground, placing TCE-laden wastewaters in unlined “sludge drying beds” dug into the dirt and using a 4,000-gallon TCE storage tank that it was aware was leaking.

In a separate ruling last year, a second district court judge, Lorna G. Schofield, pinpointed when Grumman, through consultant and regulator warnings, should have known its liability: “No reasonable jury could conclude that in June 1976, Grumman lacked sufficient information” to reasonably know its pollution could leave it on the hook for damages.

The first case contained unintended revelations, as telling documents emerged that were never meant to be seen.

Nearly every exhibit submitted by Northrop Grumman and Travelers was filed under seal, meaning they were to be kept from public view, as were those submitted by another party, Century Indemnity, a successor company to Grumman’s insurer during the 1950s and 1960s.

But Newsday discovered that 20 of the 39 exhibits Century offered in support of one motion — all marked “confidential” — had not been sealed as intended and were available on a court records website with the notation “FILING ERROR — DEFICIENT DOCKET ENTRY.”

Together with historical news articles and decades of official correspondence Newsday obtained under state and federal Freedom of Information laws, the secret documents reveal what the company and regulators knew, when they knew it and what was withheld from the public.

The court records mistakenly left unshielded contain prophetic governmental concerns about Grumman’s toxic wastes going back to the 1950s, profound warnings from a company consultant in the ’70s and a confidential summary of a 1989 meeting that declared Grumman’s unequivocal responsibility for pollution that had reached public drinking wells.

There is also urgent internal correspondence from a Northrop Grumman manager in 2000 alerting that the plume was spreading well beyond the contours predicted by company consultants.

Several documents detail how state and county officials for years falsely blamed the bulk of the pollution on a neighboring manufacturer. They clung to this position even though, as Grumman’s own consultants noted early on, at least one of its tainted wells was positioned north of the adjacent plant — in an area where groundwater contamination flowed south.

In her 2014 decision, Judge Forrest discredited Northrop Grumman’s argument that Grumman provided late notice to its insurer because it initially thought it wasn’t responsible, writing: “a belief in non-liability was unreasonable based on the factual record.”

From denial to dodging

Little in this trove of confidential documents has been known publicly, making their language and findings all the more extraordinary.

In 1955, for example, the Nassau County Health Department determined that Grumman’s toxic wastes, then believed to be limited to chromium and other heavy metals, could “concentrate as slugs or ribbons which might eventually contaminate the water in public supply wells at a considerable distance.”

That assessment, seven years after chromium first reached a public drinking water well beyond Grumman’s plant, is the earliest known forewarning that a plume could develop.

In June 1976 — after TCE had been found in a private Grumman well at a level 100 times today’s drinking water standard — the company’s environmental consultant concluded that “sources of contamination consisting of basins, lagoons, spills, etc. have created a slug of contaminated ground water in the shallow aquifer underlying at least part of the plant.”

That is the first known instance of contamination being identified by Grumman’s own experts as likely caused by its own practices.

Even after that, the company consistently stated that it was not to blame.

“A Grumman spokesman denied that the company’s own operations were responsible for the contamination,” Newsday reported in November 1976.

More recently, the company, with the state’s help, moved from denial to persistently minimizing the problem and dodging costs.

Beginning in 1990, the record becomes visible through voluminous Superfund documents, including long-overlooked technical reports and correspondence obtained through the public records requests.  Among the most important threads that emerge is Northrop Grumman’s development of a computer model that substantially underestimated how much the plume would grow.  

The modeling was particularly important because it was used by the state as a basis for developing limited, less-expensive cleanup plans that failed to stop the spread.

In 2000, it predicted that the toxic contamination wouldn’t reach public water supply wells beyond Bethpage in at least the next 30 years. Within a decade three additional wells required treatment.

A Bethpage well that it predicted would virtually be rid of TCE now treats contamination nearly 70 times the drinking water standard.  

As it relied heavily on Grumman analyses like this, the state, at its most extreme, dismissed early calls to tackle the off-site groundwater pollution, remarking in 1990 that it “would be a waste of time and money.”

Basil Seggos, appointed the state’s environmental conservation commissioner in 2015, called the plume’s growth during the first quarter century of Superfund oversight “unacceptable.” The state in 2017 spent $6 million to conduct its own analysis, leading to a new model that informed the current $585 million cleanup plan.

“We’ve certainly put in place a much more aggressive and advanced and ambitious look into this,” he said in an interview.

200,000 pounds removed

Northrop Grumman declined multiple requests for sit-down interviews made between last June and earlier this month.

Tim Paynter, a Northrop Grumman spokesman, issued this  statement: “For over two decades of environmental remediation efforts in Bethpage, Northrop Grumman has worked closely and extensively with New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, the United States Navy, the New York State Department of Health, and other federal, state and local regulatory authorities to develop and implement scientifically sound remediation strategies that protect human health and the environment. Northrop Grumman’s commitment to remediation in Bethpage is an important aspect of its ongoing legacy; one which honors its exemplary service to the country since before World War II, during the space race, and today, as our Bethpage team continues to work on critical national security programs.

“Northrop Grumman remains committed to working with all stakeholders to provide for fact-based, scientifically-sound remediation efforts that advance the cleanup and help protect the community without unnecessary disruption and potential harm.”

The company has repeatedly defended its waste disposal practices as legal at the time, although the Superfund process holds polluters responsible for costs nonetheless.

In terms of cleanup, Northrop Grumman especially touts its system of five containment wells along the southern boundary of the old 600-acre property. The state estimates it has extracted nearly 200,000 pounds, or 18,000 gallons, of groundwater contaminants in the more than two decades it has operated.

“We cut off that offsite migration,” Ed Hannon, a Northrop Grumman project manager, told residents at a January public hearing.

But approximately 200,000 more pounds of TCE still await removal, according to the state. After seven years of planning and construction, the company is still completing its first comprehensive off-site system of wells to remove plume contaminants before they reach drinking supplies, joining one that the Navy operates and another it is planning.

The Navy since 1995 has contributed more than $45 million for five public water supply treatments installed by the Bethpage and South Farmingdale water districts and New York American Water, which serves thousands of customers nearby. Northrop Grumman, in comparison, has paid about $5.4 million in construction and maintenance costs for the first two systems built by Bethpage in the early 1990s, according to a company attorney’s demand to Travelers for coverage.

“The Navy is focused on fulfilling its responsibility to protect human health and the environment, and we take our role in these cleanup efforts seriously,” a Navy spokesman, J.C. Kreidel, said in a statement when asked about the difference in public treatment contributions.

Northrop Grumman has cited these existing treatments — and the reassurances from government officials that they make the area’s drinking water safe — to argue that a more extensive cleanup is unnecessary. Water providers say that argument unfairly leaves the burden of continued monitoring and expense on them and their ratepayers — not on the polluters.

Experts also note that it’s unknown how the various contaminants in the toxic mix react with each other, what new ones — like the solvent stabilizer 1,4-dioxane, a likely carcinogen — will emerge that can’t be removed by traditional treatment and what happens if all of this hits the Great South Bay.

‘Should we trust them?’

As recently as last summer, local officials publicly celebrated Grumman on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. But some actions by the company and its successor are serving to break those strong bonds of community pride, residents say.

Northrop Grumman went to court successfully to fight paying more than $30 million in remediation and treatment costs borne by taxpayers. Newly discovered records show that Grumman once presented the public with cherry-picked data to paint a misleading picture of how much TCE it was putting into the ground.

And its donation of land to the Town of Oyster Bay turned into an environmental debacle.

The 18 acres, gifted in the early ’60s, led to creation of Bethpage Community Park, a multigenerational centerpiece with a swimming pool, ice skating rink and ballfield.

It turned out that the gift included what had been a dumpsite for Grumman’s toxic wastewater sludge and solvent soaked rags, a fact undisclosed to the public for 40 years.

In 2002, less than a decade after the state had summarily ruled out the park as a pollution concern, it was shut down because the soil was found to contain elevated levels of two carcinogens, the industrial compound polychlorinated biphenyl, or PCB, and chromium.

Most of the facility reopened within a year, but the park’s ballfield, built directly over the three-plus acres that Grumman had once called an “open pit” for its wastes, remains closed.

In 2007, the Bethpage Water District discovered that the ballfield also was the source of some of the highest levels yet detected of TCE-tainted groundwater — several thousand parts per billion. The state would soon confirm it as a second plume, now commingled with the original mass from the Grumman plant.

The park saga is one of the better-known components of the Grumman pollution story. But the Newsday investigation has uncovered documents showing that the town knew from the start how the site had been used — though it believed the wastes were nontoxic. Once it became clear that its contamination had spawned another plume, Northrop Grumman consultants tried to obscure the detailed history of site dumping that another consultant had previously written.

Today, Bethpage residents are increasingly joining class action and personal injury lawsuits over the decades of contamination, mostly against Northrop Grumman but also against Oyster Bay. Many in the community have become consumed by suspicions that the cancers afflicting their family members, neighbors and themselves can be traced to the pollution, despite a lack of conclusive proof.

Pamela Carlucci, 68, a cancer survivor who has lived in Bethpage for 43 years, encapsulated the feelings that many in her community have of the polluters, regulators and even the water providers who have battled for a stronger plume offensive.

“Should we trust them?”

Moments of consequence

Underlying many of the missteps that forestalled a comprehensive cleanup was a failure to tell the public the truth when the problem was first emerging.

Below are a few of the numerous examples of private knowledge kept secret, some of it further shrouded by public statements to the contrary.

They have been culled from an extensive four-part history of how the contamination came to be — and how it grew. As much as they reveal on their own, these examples stand out even more in the context detailed in that chronicle of failure.

1. ‘CONTAMINATION MAY SPREAD’

In June 1976, Grumman’s environmental consultants, Geraghty & Miller, presented the company with the confidential memo that pointed to the “basins, lagoons, spills, etc.” as the cause of the “slug” of pollution below ground. In an attached rendering, they labeled this source as part of Grumman’s facility. The memo offered four alternatives for how to deal with the situation.

In prescient terms, it also warned that the groundwater contamination, which had already shut several Grumman wells, “may spread both laterally and vertically beneath the property.” It cautioned that “neighboring wells may become contaminated over the long term” and that “further contamination may take place from sources presently not detected.”

All those projections came to pass. Officials today believe that the failure to acknowledge and act on them came at a big price.

“If they had done their job in the ’70s – ’76 – when they knew about the polluted wells; if they would have done their job then, we wouldn’t be here today,” said John Sullivan, chairman of Bethpage Water District’s board of commissioners.

Grumman didn’t tell employees or the public these findings, which were concluded with a call for the company to further investigate as it switched its drinking water supply to Bethpage wells to “eliminate the problem of potential adverse health effects.”

The general problem of groundwater contamination at the site only surfaced a half-year later when an alarmed state official with access to water sampling results called an Albany newspaper.

But the consultant’s precise analysis of what the future could hold didn’t emerge until now.

2. ‘I’D DRINK THE WATER’

On Dec. 2, 1976, the Bethpage Water District received the first results showing that one of its public wells was contaminated with TCE. Readings would reach as high as 60 parts per billion, above the soon-to-be-approved state limit of 50.

The well had only been intermittently used in the months before, but Bethpage residents had still been drinking its untreated water for years. That morning, state, local and federal officials, including Nassau County Health Commissioner John Dowling, met with Grumman representatives to discuss the pollution’s spread from the company grounds into the community.

The meeting and its attendees were documented in confidential handwritten notes to Grumman by Geraghty & Miller, another of the Century Insurance documents.

It recorded a sharp disagreement between representatives of the federal Environmental Protection Agency and those of the state environmental department:

EPA — “Don’t drink the water”

State [illegible] disagrees

EPA — “no basis for levels that are acceptable”

Dowling, who is now deceased, told Newsday later that day: “If I lived in the area, I would continue to drink the water. We don’t have any information that the chemicals are harmful in drinking water.”

It was only last year that the New York Department of Health stated for the first time that levels of TCE in Bethpage public water before 1976 were high enough to harm people’s health.

3. ‘NO QUESTION REGARDING LIABILITY’

By August 1989, the Bethpage Water District had privately notified Grumman that a second of its public wells had been polluted with TCE. A company executive, along with an engineer, a lawyer and an insurance manager, huddled with Travelers representatives to discuss a possible settlement.

Another memo that was meant to be sealed offered a blunt summary of the closed-door discussion: “Data is conclusive that it is Grumman plume which is contaminating the [Bethpage] Water Districts [sic] well.”

It later underscored the point: “No question regarding liability as there are no other direct parties [that] appear to have contributed to contamination yet.”

Grumman didn’t come out of the meeting and acknowledge its role.

In fact, a few months later it did the opposite. One of the executives who attended the meeting was among a group of top Grumman officials that spoke to a community newspaper. They told it the company didn’t admit liability for the contamination.

The headline on the May 1990 story: “Bethpage Water Among the Safest:  Rumors of Grumman Contamination Pose No Threat.”

Emerging in Newsday’s investigation, document by document and incident by incident, is the secret history of an environmental disaster that could have been contained long ago and a public that should have known more.

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Reporters/writers: Paul LaRocco and David M. Schwartz Project editor: Martin Gottlieb Additional editing: Doug Dutton Project manager: Heather Doyle Video director, editor: Jeffrey Basinger Video producers: Basinger and Robert Cassidy Videographers: Basinger, Shelby Knowles, Howard Schnapp, Chris Ware and Yeong-Ung Yang Photo editors: John Keating and Oswaldo Jimenez Motion Graphics: Basinger Digital design/UX: Matthew Cassella and James Stewart Additional project management: Joe Diglio Social media: Anahita Pardiwalla Research: Caroline Curtin, Dorothy Levin and Laura Mann Copy editing: Don Bruce Graphics: Andrew Wong and Basinger Print design: Seth Mates

Theirs is a community that once helped put men on the moon. Now Bethpage residents don’t trust the water coming from their taps.

They wonder whether the tomatoes they grow are safe to eat.

For nearly two decades, their kids have not been able to use a baseball field on land donated by the Grumman Aerospace company, which utilized part of it as a toxic waste dump.

Real estate agents say some prospective buyers shy from this community of trim homes and honored schools because of the pollution’s stigma.

Hovering behind all that, in conversations around dining room tables and in community meetings, are fears about whether the contamination has caused cancer.

There’s no proof it has, but residents’ wariness has caused them to question the validity of a state investigation that failed to establish a link.

Concern. Skepticism. Frustration. Beyond its other effects, the toxic legacy of Grumman’s operation has taken an emotional toll on Bethpage and sown deep distrust of the company, the U.S. Navy, which owned part of its site, and government officials. 

Amid an incomplete cleanup of a toxic mess that state officials and Grumman minimized and even denied for decades, what was long called the “Bethpage plume” has grown to be 4.3 miles long, 2.1 miles wide and as much as 900 feet deep.

Many residents are galled by the name itself, feeling it connotes that the community is responsible for its own misfortune and obscures the pollution’s spread. Treatment is required not only at drinking water wells serving Bethpage, but also for Plainedge, South Farmingdale and North Massapequa, and parts of Levittown, Seaford, Wantagh and Massapequa Park.

“This has nothing to do with our community and its people who are the victims of this environmental disaster,” said Peter Schimmel, 51, a lifelong Bethpage resident.

The state, in official documents, now calls it “the Navy Grumman” plume.

The bitterness is particularly deep because of a sense of betrayal — the company was Bethpage’s paternal corporate anchor and Long Island’s largest employer. But its days hosting community picnics and making military fighters and the Apollo 11 lunar module are long gone.

In 1994, Grumman was acquired by rival defense contractor Northrop and became part of the Northrop Grumman Corp., now headquartered in Virginia. The former 600-acre Bethpage operation, which at its peak employed 20,000, has been reduced to nine acres and 500 workers.

“It’s hard for people to understand you could put a man on the moon, you know, you can do all these things in space, and we’re totally ineffective when it comes to cleaning up the contamination we make here on Earth,” said Sandra D’Arcangelo, 76, a 40-year Bethpage resident and member of a Navy community advisory board. “My community has totally lost confidence in the effective remediation of this site. We have no confidence Grumman or the Navy would do the right thing.”

The most common pollution concern in Bethpage is about drinking water, primarily the prevalence of trichloroethylene, or TCE, a carcinogenic solvent that Grumman used to degrease metal parts. But contamination has also been found in soil at Bethpage Community Park. Vapor pollution has seeped into basements, leading the Navy to install treatment systems. And there was enough toxic soil in one neighborhood for the state to order the dirt removed from 30 homes’ yards.

The Bethpage School District has spent $250,000 drilling its own wells to test groundwater and install vapor barriers around schools. It’s found some elevated levels of radium in water around buildings and radon, the gas it breaks down into, in unoccupied school basements. The state for years maintained that the elevated levels are likely naturally occurring, but radium was also used in luminescent paint on aircraft dials and gauges.

Occasionally, heavy equipment will turn up in residential streets, drilling down thousands of feet for another sample of the plume.

Grumman and the Navy, which owned a sixth of Grumman’s site, have spent extensively on contaminant extraction and testing and have joined government officials in trying to reassure the public of the water’s safety. The Bethpage Water District has repeatedly certified that the water is safe to drink once it reaches the tap.

But they’ve been met with a lot of skepticism, and health experts say that’s not unreasonable. The variety of contaminants in the plume and potential sources of exposure make it understandable that Bethpage residents ask questions. Drinking water standards continue to tighten as scientists learn more about chemicals’ long-term effects. How multiple contaminants interact and impact human health is poorly understood.

It’s very reasonable for the community to want some answers regarding what may be happening to their health.

Dr. Ken Spaeth, division chief of occupational and environmental medicine at Northwell Health and Hofstra Northwell School of Medicine

“It’s certainly among the most significant community exposures that I’ve seen,” said Dr. Ken Spaeth, division chief of occupational and environmental medicine at Northwell Health and Hofstra Northwell School of Medicine. “The combination, the range of different types of contaminants and the toxicological profile of many of them all add up to a very concerning situation.

“It’s very reasonable for the community to want some answers regarding what may be happening to their health.” 

A suburb under a cloud

At the peak of Grumman’s operations, Bethpage brimmed with patriotism. The company built the Apollo Lunar Module. Equipment sits on the moon stamped “Made in Bethpage, New York.”

Grumman donated generously to the local Rotary Club and gave out turkeys at Christmas to employees. The roar of jet engine tests on Saturday mornings was a small price to pay — particularly when the company contributed up to $16 million a year in school property taxes.

Even without the company’s massive presence, Bethpage and surrounding hamlets served by the local water district convey a quiet American success story. They make up an archetypal suburb of 33,000 residents spread over leafy neighborhoods of single-family homes, neat lawns and strip malls dotted with pizza places, hair salons and dry cleaners. Broadway serves as Main Street for Bethpage, the unincorporated area within the Town of Oyster Bay.

Neighbors know each other, crime is low, schools are strong. The U.S. Department of Education honored Bethpage High School in September for academic excellence, one of three schools cited on Long Island.

Even the water was once a source of pride. At state fairs and Long Island malls, the Bethpage Water District won multiple blind taste tests against other water providers. A sign entering town once announced, “Welcome to Bethpage, Home of New York State’s Best Tasting Drinking Water.”

But tucked into the residential neighborhoods are visual markers of Bethpage’s problem.

At three water district well sites, metal “air stripping” towers that look like grain silos rise as high as 60 feet. Water from the plume trickles down over golf-ball-sized materials to disperse it  into fine droplets, while air is forced upward to evaporate volatile organic compounds.

The sites also include storage tanks holding 20,000 pounds of crushed carbon to absorb contamination — acting like giant Brita filters.

At the district’s Plant 6, where TCE contamination first closed a well in 1976, the water district has been constructing a $19.5 million building with an advanced system designed to remove 1,4-dioxane, a newly regulated contaminant once used to stabilize solvents like TCE.

Still, as far back as 1992, a Navy community relations plan reported that residents were concerned that contamination from the Navy and Grumman “may be a factor in the development of cancer.”

The report noted that, “As a result of their concerns, many residents who were interviewed stated that they were drinking and/or cooking with bottled water rather than municipal water from groundwater sources.”

‘What is it then?’

After two breast cancer diagnoses and uterine cancer, Maryann Levtchenko, 68, got genetic testing to see if she was predisposed to the diseases. She wasn’t.

“So maybe I do need to tell my story, because what is it then? It makes me question my whole life,” said Levtchenko, who is part of a pending 2016 class-action lawsuit against Northrop Grumman.

Levtchenko and her husband moved to Bethpage in 1975 and raised two kids, spending summers at Bethpage Community Park.

She adored the community and still does, she said from her living room, where she handed visitors bottled water.

“The unfortunate thing — I love it here,” Levtchenko said. “It’s a safe neighborhood, everybody knows one another. Everybody’s caring.”

She and her husband are retired, she said. But they stayed.

Still, Levtchenko believes something in the tap water, which she drank until only recent years, made her sick. She counts cases of multiple myeloma on her street and thinks about four parents of her son’s group of six friends who died of cancer when the kids were in school.

“It was like a Bethpage flare,” she said.

Cancer, a generic term for more than 100 separate diseases, is frightfully common across New York. One of every two men and one of every three women will likely be diagnosed with a cancer during their lifetimes, according to the state Department of Health. New York’s cancer rate is the fifth highest in the country, according to the state Department of Health.

Still, Bethpage residents feel that cancer cases are more prevalent here.

A few blocks away from Levtchenko, Pamela Carlucci, 68, a breast cancer survivor, took a photo of smiling neighbors off her refrigerator and started pointing.

“Cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer,” Carlucci said.

She and neighbors sat around her dining room table, counting at least 15 families with cancer among 29 nearby houses. Some of those households have seen numerous cases. For instance, Carlucci’s son, Philip, died of brain cancer at age 30 in 2007.

“It’s our own Love Canal,” Carlucci said, referring to the western New York neighborhood abandoned in the late 1970s after it was found to be inundated with industrial contamination.

“We all had gardens, my goodness. We grew eggplants, peppers, tomatoes, parsley,” said Deanna Gianni, 79, whose husband, Joseph, a mechanic, died of stomach cancer at age 74 in 2011.

Edward Mangano, the former Nassau County legislator and county executive who lives a mile and a half from Bethpage Community Park, remembers growing concerns about Grumman pollution in the 1980s and 1990s.

The issue hit home when his brother was diagnosed with multiple myeloma at age 36.

“Can you eat tomatoes you grow in the backyard? That was the number one question at every meeting,” said Mangano, who served as county executive from 2010 until 2017 and is appealing his 2019 conviction on federal corruption charges.   

Homes are selling, but residents wonder if they’d get more if not for the pollution.

“I find it very difficult to show properties here,” Barbara Ciminera, a real estate broker, wrote in comments to the state about its latest cleanup plan. “People just don’t want to see anything here while this is going on.”

Real estate agents will sometimes ask Bethpage Water District representatives to stop by open houses to reassure prospective buyers.

“They’ll call the district and say, ‘We’re having an open house on Saturday. Do you think you can come by from 12 to 2 in case anyone has any questions?’” said district superintendent Michael Boufis.

I don’t think I know anybody that drinks water out of the tap.

Stephen Campagne, a Bethpage resident

Compounding residents’ fears is that the water’s taste, once a source of pride, has diminished, unrelated to the Grumman pollution.

In 2010, the state, citing bioterrorism concerns, removed the district’s waiver that allowed it not to use chlorine.

District tries to reassure

In the foyers of some homes, delivery jugs of bottled water still pile up.

“I don’t think I know anybody that drinks water out of the tap,” said Carlucci’s brother, Stephen Campagne, 65, a retired Con Edison worker who has lived in Bethpage since 1980.

Even the water district acknowledges that many residents haul cases of bottled water home.

“King Kullen, 3 for $9.99, they’re on every cart that walks out,” said district commissioner John Coumatos, a Bethpage restaurant owner.

At meetings, street fairs and festivals, the district repeats the mantra that it treats and tests plume water above drinking standards — and that tap water is more scrutinized than what is bottled.

“We try to tell the consumers the water’s fine. We fight it every day. Fight it every day,” Coumatos said.

It’s an uphill battle.

“Grumman’s caused that situation,” Coumatos said about the distrust of public water. Rebuilding trust will take time, he said. “You can’t pay enough money to take care of that.”

Bethpage Water District has just 12 full-time employees.

With that small staff, the district has had to fight for more aggressive cleanup while reassuring the public. And the list of concerns has only grown to include 1,4-dioxane as well as radium. The discovery of radium at elevated levels in 2012 led to the district shutting down one of its nine public supply wells.

Experts said the mounting disclosure of potential risk factors in Bethpage adds to the inclination for residents to connect cancers to pollution.

“A person who already believes that chemicals which have leached into our groundwater cause cancer is very prone to seek out and favor stories and information which confirm this belief,” said Dr. Curtis W. Reisinger, a clinical psychologist at Northwell Health.

Authors of the only state cancer study in Bethpage, which found in 2013 no evidence of higher rates, described their results as “scientifically appropriate and as informative as existing data will allow.”

Yet, Reisinger asked, “Are we so wrong to think the causes are environmental?”

“From a certain sense we can’t blame people for looking for external causes. And if you live on Long Island and you’re programmed pretty much cognitively, psychologically to look for causes other than genetics, it makes a lot of sense that — maybe it is the environment,” he said. “That’s what science is saying now, maybe the environment is responsible for a lot of this stuff.”

More than 1,000 current and former Bethpage-area residents have joined class action or personal injury suits about health effects from the pollution that stemmed from Grumman’s historic operations, lawyers said.

The Melville personal injury law firm Napoli Shkolnik represents most of those people, including Carlucci and Levtchenko, in the ongoing suits against Northrop Grumman, as well as the Town of Oyster Bay, which owns the Community Park property.

“My experience in environmental cases is that, fundamentally, not only the polluters — but the community politics — want to downplay the risks associated with any sort of contamination,” said Paul J. Napoli, a partner in the firm. “The polluters, because of liability, and the local politics because they don’t want to create hysteria.”

‘We’re tired’

At the former Grumman site on Grumman Road, about two dozen people came to a town community center last November to hear Navy representatives give an update on the cleanup, as required by federal law.

Northrop Grumman sent representatives to the meeting, according to the Navy, but they didn’t speak or publicly identify themselves. Northrop Grumman is mandated by the state to conduct its own public meetings about its cleanup.

The meeting, with bottled water provided upfront, quickly became a forum for residents to vent their frustration.

A dozen state and Navy officials and consultants sat off to one side, with the Navy’s highlighting ongoing cleanup initiatives and others they plan to start soon.

But the Navy’s project manager also affirmed that it would oppose the state’s more ambitious plan to fully stop the plume’s spread.

Instead, the manager, Brian Murray, said while some of the plume would continue to spread, under the Navy’s current plan it would concentrate on removing the highest toxic concentrations in the expectation the rest would naturally dilute, dissipate and break down.

Water district officials who have watched the plume spread for decades said the hope was illusory.

“Your solution to pollution is dilution,” said Teri Black, a real estate agent and Bethpage Water District commissioner. “I was glad I was sitting. It is unacceptable.”

Richard Catalano, 61, of Seaford, a human resources manager whose home sits above the plume, criticized the pace of action.

“It’s a disgrace what the Navy’s done!” he shouted.

Gina McGovern, a teacher and Bethpage resident, at one point interrupted: “I realize I’m talking out of turn and I apologize to all of you. But I’ve been sitting in these chairs for 20 years. I had to get babysitters when I first started. My youngest is out of college now. You know how much time in my life I spent sitting on these chairs, listening to the Navy discuss how they’re drilling holes?” she said.

David Sobolow, a volunteer co-chair of the Navy advisory board, noted Grumman’s absence among the presenters. “With all due respect, the Navy is the one that’s here trying to solve the problem.”

After the meeting, McGovern explained her anger. “The whole town is just — you can see the frustration level. We’re tired. We’re tired of trying to be nice. We’re tired of trying to be polite.”

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It was toxic soil vapor seeping into a handful of homes, not the massive groundwater plume emanating from the old Grumman property, that triggered Bethpage’s lone community cancer study.

After a three-year investigation, state health officials in 2013 found no higher overall cancer rates in a 20-block area closest to the former Grumman and Navy property, although they also noted the scientific limitations that make linking residential cancer clusters and pollution nearly impossible.

The cancer study did find that within a one-block area, all those diagnosed with cancer were younger than expected. But it concluded that even so, it was too small an area to provide a clear indication of an unusual pattern.

The debate over the strengths and weaknesses of the study — what to make of it and whether a more thorough investigation could have determined more — lingers in a community that for decades has believed it experiences a disproportionate share of cancer.

At its heart, the community is asking a seemingly simple question: Has the pollution in the water, soil and air caused illness there?

Answering that question through science is maddeningly elusive.

Calls for a study

The state has repeatedly counseled residents not to worry because all Bethpage drinking water is treated to government standards and is therefore safe to drink. Similarly, living over the underground water pollution “plume” hundreds of feet below poses no risk to the public, officials said.

Any study, however, that could support or debunk findings like the state’s confronts the scientific difficulty of tying an individual case of cancer to a specific source, an extreme rarity in almost any situation, experts said. Finding clusters of cancers is hard enough; linking those to a pollution source is rarer still.

The Bethpage study took form after the Navy in 2008 found vapors of the solvent trichloroethylene, or TCE, and two other chemical solvents in soil around its property, which Grumman operated. Further testing found contamination had reached a nearby neighborhood.

The Navy installed air purification units at 14 homes, as well as a system to extract and contain soil vapors on its property.

Inside a handful of homes, the levels of the solvents were above state limits meant to protect human health.

By 2009, the clamor for a state cancer study had become intense. One resident provided a list of nearly 80 people diagnosed with cancer or lupus since the early 1960s. Community members made a map stuck with color-coded pins matched to different diagnoses and compiled a list of Bethpage High School graduates and parents stricken with cancer.

Edward Mangano, then a county legislator from Bethpage, and then-state Sen. Carl Marcellino asked the state to conduct a survey.

In April 2009, the state Department of Health’s Cancer Surveillance Program began evaluating cancer cases and possible environmental exposures. It relied on the state’s Cancer Registry — a database of all cases of cancer diagnosed or treated in New York State, tied to patients’ addresses.

No ‘unusual patterns’

The state released its finding of no higher overall rates in January 2013.

Using photographs of the community map and lists of cancer cases gathered by neighbors, the study found the citizens’ evidence inadequate.

Of the nearly 80 cases of cancer reported by residents, researchers could only confirm eight with the state’s database. Working off two photographs of the map, the study authors said that only “some of the names were visible.” A list attached with the map — provided by unnamed residents to the Navy, which passed it to the state — included streets and blocks where people had been diagnosed with cancer and were grouped by cancer type, but it did not include names.

“Much of the information that would have been useful for a more complete cancer evaluation was not available,” the state report said. “The information that was available did not indicate any unusual patterns of cancer.”

The state concluded other evidence was unpersuasive.

Five cases of breast cancer among 1979 and 1980 graduates of Bethpage High School were higher than the two cases that would be expected, for example. But the increase wasn’t statistically significant and could have been by chance, the study determined.

The information that was available did not indicate any unusual patterns of cancer.

Department of Health’s Cancer Surveillance Program report

But the state also decided to look at possible exposure to pollution in the area. Toxic vapor in homes justified taking an additional look at cancer rates, using the state’s database to drill down on specific areas, it determined.

In particular, researchers focused on blocks within the neighborhood known as the “Number Streets” that includes homes on 11th Street, where TCE and other chemical vapors had been found.

In the 19-block L-shaped area, south of Bethpage Community Park and east of the Navy-owned land, the study found 88 cases of invasive malignant cancers from 1976 to 2009.

But based on the average cancer rates in the state, outside of New York City, 107 cancer cases would have been predicted.

The report said, “uncertainties with population estimation may have led to an overestimate of the number of cases expected. Still, the calculations provide no evidence that the total number of cancers or the number of cases of any individual cancer was greater than expected in the study areas.”

The other area examined was a single block directly east of the former Navy site — between 11th and 10th streets, and Sycamore and Maple avenues — where chemical vapors had been found in or under six homes at levels above state standards.

In that block, six people were diagnosed with “invasive malignant” cancer between 1976 and 2009, including the types of cancers linked to chemicals found there . Still, the number was only slightly higher than the five that would have been predicted based on state averages, and not statistically significant, the report said.

The analysis found one concerning feature below the topline number: All those diagnosed with cancer were in their mid-20s to early 50s, younger than average for the different cancers.

“The number of cancers diagnosed in people under age 55 was greater than the number expected,” according to the report, which didn’t specify the statistically predictive number. “This difference was statistically significant, meaning that it was not likely to occur by chance.”

The report concluded that “due to the limited size of this one-block area, however, these results do not provide a clear indication of an unusual pattern of cancers.”

In a question-and-answer website released with the study, the state Department of Health said no follow-up was warranted.

‘They didn’t speak to anybody’

The results left many residents disappointed and frustrated that the state didn’t go beyond its database and knock on doors.

“They didn’t speak to anybody,” said Jeanne O’Connor, who co-founded a group that has collected 2,000 cancer cases in the hope of prompting another state study. She said the effort has become overwhelming, and the group has shifted its efforts to expanding awareness.

“They needed a bigger sampling area,” said Mangano, who later served as Nassau County executive from 2010 to 2017 and is appealing his 2019 conviction on federal corruption charges.

He said exposure went beyond the 20-block area studied and included people who were exposed for decades at Bethpage Community Park. Mangano had requested that the state examine a larger area.

The state, however, said larger areas, outside the blocks with the highest exposure levels, can often dilute results, making a cancer connection less likely. It also said its Cancer Registry is highly accurate, as certified by a national association of registries. And door-to-door surveys can be unreliable, with some residents unwilling to share information or unaware of previous residents’ diagnoses, according to the state.

The state Department of Health, like most federal and state agencies around the country that have attempted studies, has never tied a residential cancer cluster to chemical exposure in the environment.

Just three community cancer clusters nationally have been linked with environmental exposures such as water or air pollution, according to a 2012 paper that reviewed 567 cancer cluster investigations over the previous 20 years. They included cases of childhood leukemia in Woburn, Massachusetts, from TCE and childhood cancers in Toms River, New Jersey, from industrial pollution. Just one cancer cluster in a coastal South Carolina community with lung cancer and a history of work at a nearby shipyard with asbestos had been tied to a more definitive “established cause.”

Tough to draw a link

Part of the reason for the paucity is the difficulty of the science. Most cancers can’t be traced to a single specific cause. Additionally, cancer can take five to 40 years after exposure to develop, in which time people move and can be difficult to track. Influences such as age, race and lifestyle can affect cancer rates.

“Very often what we find is that while cancer levels are elevated, they’re not definitively linked,” said Brad Hutton, deputy commissioner for the state Department of Health, in an interview last year.

Critics say part of the problem is that state regulators tend to downplay risks and dangers in an effort not to alarm the public, but even they say studies can raise false expectations.

This type of study is not capable of demonstrating any cause-and-effect relationships.

2013 state cancer report

Dr. Howard Freed, who from 2008 to 2012 was director of the department’s Center for Environmental Health, said when there’s doubt the state minimizes risks in an effort not to cause a panic.

Freed headed the division responsible for the evaluation of the health effects of man-made chemicals.

In an email to Newsday, he wrote: “New York DOH has always emphasized scientific uncertainty over what many others see are clear warnings of real risk to the public,” adding, “Routine reassurance cannot be justified in the face of our profound scientific ignorance about the health effects of long-term exposure to toxins in drinking water.”

After reviewing the state’s Bethpage cancer study, Freed said the state appeared too quick to dismiss the community’s list of cancer cases and maps because of incomplete information, rather than trying to go back and get more data.

“It strikes me as not aggressive or a good-faith effort to try to substantiate people’s concerns,” he said in an interview. “If there’s information out there and they don’t seek it — to me it’s not effective.”

Yet Freed said another health study would be a “terrible idea.”

The state should “do what it can now to protect the public, and not wait for conclusive proof of harm, especially when such proof is unlikely to become available in the foreseeable future,” he said.

The state’s report itself laid out its limitations.

“This type of study is not capable of demonstrating any cause-and-effect relationships,” it stated. “At the current level of understanding, it is not possible to separate out all possible causes to determine the role of environmental factors in causing cancers in a small geographic area.”

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Long Island’s largest and most complex mass of groundwater pollution begins as two contaminant concentrations 50 feet below ground in Bethpage.

One starts from the western portion of the old Grumman Aerospace and U.S. Navy complex. The other originates from the east beneath Bethpage Community Park, once a Grumman waste site. They commingle beneath the southern portion of the former 600-acre manufacturing site to form a single plume.

Indistinguishable in taste, texture or smell from uncontaminated water, the plume spreads roughly south or southeast at about a foot per day between the grains of sand and gravel bits that make up the region’s aquifer system. The flow is influenced by the makeup of the soil and the action of wells that pump drinking water and treat the pollution.

It now extends south 4.3 miles from the former Grumman site, with its leading edge past the Southern State Parkway. It stretches 2.1 miles wide toward Levittown and Bethpage Parkway, and goes as much as 900 feet deep until it runs into a layer of clay that separates it from the Lloyd aquifer, Long Island’s deepest and cleanest source of water.

The contamination was first identified in the groundwater in the 1940s. The pollution has required treatment at 11 wells that provide drinking water for Bethpage, Plainedge, South Farmingdale, North Massapequa and parts of Levittown, Seaford, Wantagh and Massapequa Park. It threatens another 16 public drinking water wells. In total, 250,000 Nassau residents get their water from affected wells or those in the path of the plume.

All drinking water pumped from the plume is treated to remove contaminants before it reaches people’s faucets. Almost without fail, the water has met government standards for safety for more than 40 years. The one exception was in September 2007, when a relay switch failed for 11 days on a treatment system. The district found 10 times the drinking water standard for the carcinogen trichloroethylene, also known as TCE or trichloroethene. The well, though, was only used intermittently for about 15 hours to meet high demand.

The state has said there’s no risk to living or working above the polluted groundwater.

New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation first designated the site for cleanup in 1983 under the state’s Superfund program, which identifies former hazardous waste sites and manages their cleanup. In 1987, the state elevated the Grumman facility to a “level 2” Superfund site, which means it presents a “significant threat to public health or the environment.”

TCE is “known to be a human carcinogen,” according to the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

The state has listed two dozen “contaminants of concern” for cleanup within the plume. Thirteen chemicals and metals are designated by federal agencies as carcinogens, likely carcinogens or suspected carcinogens.

They include solvents used to clean and degrease airplane and lunar module parts, additives used to make those solvents last longer and metals used in plating.

By far the most prevalent contaminant is TCE. It was used by Grumman as a solvent for parts. It has been found in untreated groundwater outside the former Grumman boundaries at levels of 13,700 parts per billion, 2,740 times higher than the drinking water standard of 5 parts per billion. (TCE levels of 58,000 parts per billion have been found in groundwater directly beneath former Grumman operations.)

The chemical is “known to be a human carcinogen,” according to the federal Department of Health and Human Services. Scientists have linked exposure to kidney and liver cancers, malignant lymphoma, testicular cancer, immune system diseases and developmental effects such as spontaneous abortion, small birth weight and congenital heart and central nervous system defects.

TCE, which in its pure form has a sweet smell, had been stored in a leaky 4,000-gallon tank at one of the Grumman plants.

The contamination also was caused by Grumman’s disposal and routine housekeeping practices. Chemicals have been found in old cesspools, dry wells and storage areas, as well as unlined pits where wastewater was dried into sludge and workers discarded dirty rags.

Besides TCE, the two most common plume contaminants are tetrachloroethene, also known as PCE or PERC, used as a solvent to clean aircraft parts; and cis-1,2-Dichloroethene, or cis-1,2-DCE, also found in solvents.

Discovered in soil at the former Grumman site has been one contaminant not found in the groundwater — the now banned industrial compound polychlorinated biphenyl, or PCB. Soil has also been contaminated with volatile organic compounds like TCE and chromium, which was a metal plating agent.

One chemical the district is still working to remove is the likely carcinogen 1,4-dioxane, used by Grumman as a solvent stabilizer. It has been found in Bethpage Water District drinking water wells at levels up to 15 times higher than the state’s proposed standard.

The district began operating in October a treatment system for 1,4-dioxane in the first of its six affected wells. State health officials say 1,4-dioxane poses a slightly elevated risk of cancer after long-term exposure.

Northrop Grumman, which acquired Grumman in 1994, has for more than 20 years operated treatment wells at its former facility to remove contamination and prevent it from spreading further. The state estimates 200,000 pounds of contaminants, or 18,000 gallons, have been removed from the plume. It also estimates that another 200,000 pounds of contaminants remain.

In December 2009, Northrop Grumman began operating another set of wells to contain pollution coming from the eastern plume at Bethpage Community Park. The state estimates it has removed approximately 2,200 pounds of contamination.

Since 2009, the Navy has operated the only groundwater treatment wells outside the former facility grounds aimed at removing an area of the plume with a high concentration of contaminants. The system treats about 1.4 million gallons of water per day and has removed more than 11,000 pounds of contamination.

Northrop Grumman and the Navy are each constructing other treatment systems in Bethpage at “hotspots” that have elevated contamination levels. They are scheduled to open in 2021 and 2020, respectively. But they have resisted efforts to contain the plume as it continues to spread toward the Great South Bay.

The state has approved a $585 million plan to use a series of 24 wells and treatment systems to stop the plume from spreading and clean the underground water. It would cost $241 million to construct, plus millions more each year to maintain and operate. It would take 110 years to clean the entire groundwater plume to 5 parts per billion of contamination or less.

The Navy and Northrop Grumman have opposed the plan, saying it’s not feasible and that the public can be protected by treating water before it reaches faucets.

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For a time, Grumman Aerospace seemed as if it put all of Long Island to work.

It began manufacturing in Bethpage, on grounds that would swell to 600 acres, in 1937. The U.S. Navy opened its 105-acre Naval Weapons Industrial Reserve Plant, operated by Grumman, soon after.

“Grummanites” — including the women who’d be dubbed “The Janes Who Made the Planes” — produced the thousands of Hellcat fighters that helped the United States destroy enemy aircraft over the Pacific in World War II.

At its peak, more than 20,000 people would be a part of the company’s thrumming, 24/7 operation. It became known for its massive company picnics and youth sports sponsorships (the esteemed Panthers football club was named after a famed Grumman jet).

But beneath the surface, a problem was developing.

The first warnings that activities at Grumman threatened the environment came not long after the war. They would continue consistently through the late 1980s, when Grumman, as it would say in 2018, “sought to understand how legacy military operations, that were standard practices during America’s history, may have contaminated soil and groundwater.”

The warnings actually trickled out for decades before that in often-confidential government and company reports, which are now coming to light for the first time as a result of a nine-month Newsday investigation.

In the most prophetic, the Nassau County Health Department in 1955 concluded that toxic discharges from Grumman “might eventually contaminate the water in public supply wells at a considerable distance.”

Today the still-spreading plume of groundwater contaminants is 4.3 miles long, 2.1 miles wide and at points 900 feet deep. It extends through much of Bethpage and has required treatment of public water supplies serving numerous other communities.

The county’s caution 65 years ago, as well as ones that began intensifying in the mid-1970s, were largely met with denials from a company with great political sway and an underlying deference from government at all levels.

At first, heavy metals were the primary contaminants of concern. But they’d soon be eclipsed by the degreasing solvent trichloroethylene, or TCE, which Grumman used and disposed of in abundant volumes that seeped into groundwater.

As a result, the organic compound, a carcinogen, is now the most voluminous of two dozen contaminants within the plume.

Northrop Grumman, as the company has been known since a rival defense contractor acquired it in 1994, shares cleanup responsibility with the Navy, which owned a sixth of the land where Grumman operated its plant.

There’s a pretty standard playbook that these companies apply.

Carroll Muffett, president and CEO of Center for International Environmental Law

Both parties point to substantial work they’ve done under oversight by the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s Superfund program for hazardous waste sites.

Most significantly, the Navy has paid tens of millions of dollars for public water supply treatment, while Northrop Grumman has since the late 1990s operated an extensive system that extracts the toxic chemicals from beneath its original properties to stop further spread.

“The company’s ongoing evaluation shows it is effectively capturing groundwater contaminants as it was designed to do,” Northrop Grumman said in a 2018 fact sheet about the Bethpage pollution.

Yet enormous amounts of contaminants have already spread from the old company grounds, even as Northrop Grumman has long disputed the severity of the pollution. It continues to oppose the most-comprehensive off-site plume containment plans and has fought millions of dollars in cleanup costs that fell to taxpayers.

One environmental lawyer who has taken on timber, plastics and oil companies said the company appears to be using an oft-employed corporate template for forestalling financial and reputational damage.

“There’s a pretty standard playbook that these companies apply,” said Carroll Muffett, president and CEO for the nonprofit advocacy group Center for International Environmental Law.

“First, they deny that anything is happening, and then they deny that what is happening is a problem,” he said. “Then they deny that they’re responsible, and then at the end, when all of those other things have been disproven, they argue that it’s not economically viable to fix the problem.”

Frequently, Northrop Grumman has pointed out that at the time Grumman employed its historical waste disposal practices, they were legal, a factor that does not lessen its obligation under the Superfund law.

The company declined multiple requests for interviews but stated in the fact sheet that it has worked for more than 20 years with state, local and federal officials “to investigate and remediate legacy environmental conditions.” It noted it has signed three formal state cleanup decisions and “is implementing its obligations under these agreements.”

“Northrop Grumman has devoted significant resources to our environmental efforts in Bethpage and spent over $200 million to date to help clean up the environment and protect the health and well-being of the community,” company spokesman Vic Beck said in a further statement to Newsday.

Early warnings

The first known instance of Grumman contaminants infiltrating Bethpage’s public water supply came nearly 75 years ago.

In 1947, the state notified Grumman that the Central Park Water District (the Bethpage Water District’s predecessor) found chromium in one of its public supply wells. Grumman sprayed the metal plating agent on its aircraft parts. The resulting wastewaters containing the toxic substance were dried into sludges and, as was common at the time, disposed of directly into the ground.

Even with far less understanding of the health hazards of industrial chemicals, Grumman was accused of endangering Long Island’s sole source aquifer for drinking water.

Then-Rep. W. Kingsland Macy told Newsday he “feared the waters that carried metallic poisons into the ground may eventually contaminate the water table.”

The company responded in Newsday that it “doubted” the plant’s operations put the public at risk. The chromium levels in the water, some of which remain, were then hundreds of times above today’s acceptable standards. The metal also is still present in soil on Grumman’s old properties.

By late 1949, Grumman agreed to pay for new water district wells and said it had changed its disposal practices to address the contamination. Referring to how it would now treat its wastewaters at an on-site facility, the company wrote to the state health department in early 1950 that “the dumping of spray-booth wastes into a remotely located open pit, has ceased,” according to a letter filed in a 2012 federal lawsuit by Grumman’s former insurers, the Travelers Cos.

Travelers successfully argued that it has no duty to defend the company against liabilities for past practices in part because Grumman hadn’t provided it with enough notice about its role in or knowledge of environmental pollution.

The letter was one of several marked confidential in the case but mistakenly left unsealed.

Even after the 1950 letter, Grumman continued to dispose of the treated sludge — as well as other wastes — throughout its facility, where it had dug at least a dozen shallow artificial ponds, or recharge basins.

Regulators at the time were beginning to key into the groundwater dangers of chromium and several common industrial metals, including arsenic and cadmium, the latter of which would also show up in Grumman’s sludges.

Another chemical, however, ended up being of graver consequence.

In one internal document, Grumman says it began using TCE in 1949. The chlorinated solvent, a degreasing agent, was sprayed from wands and soaked into rags that would wipe down work areas. But its most-common application was through massive vats that boiled the solvent into vapors to remove impurities from metal parts.

“These degreasers were everywhere, especially in the aircraft industry,” said Steve Swisdak, a forensic historian who reconstructs manufacturing practices, with a focus on TCE use, that have led to modern environmental contamination. “It was remarkably efficient at cleaning metal parts.”

Military manuals from the 1940s warned of the dangers of TCE, counseling against inhalation and skin contact and, in one general caution, advising that it not be dumped into sewage systems. But for all the apprehension, it would be decades until the solvent’s dangers to groundwater became known.

A defender of Grumman’s legacy said the company can’t be judged too harshly.

“We were much less concerned with the environment in those days. And the net result is we were sloppy,” said George Hochbrueckner, a former congressman from Suffolk County who worked at Grumman facilities in the 1960s and early ’70s. “But at the time, the level of environmental protection wasn’t there as it is today. So it’s a problem we created ourselves when we were in good times doing good things for the nation.”

‘Such wastes do not dilute’

Still, contemporary records reveal more than one early warning to Grumman that its general practices could harm the environment.

In 1955, Grumman applied to the state for two new industrial production wells as it expanded an operation that would pump tens of millions of gallons of water per week to its plants.

That set up the prophetic warning from the Nassau County Health Department predicting that the pollution could spread. The department objected to the application, noting in a letter — another left unsealed in the Travelers lawsuit — that the company’s recharge basins “contain toxic chemicals in sufficient quantities to pollute the ground water supply in the area to concentrations well beyond maximum allowable limits for a satisfactory drinking water supply.”

At the time, the U.S. Public Health Service had already recommended levels of chromium in drinking water not exceed 50 parts per billion.

The county letter states that chromium (as well as cadmium, another carcinogen) at levels of up to 1,700 parts per billion remained in Grumman’s basins. The company said then that it believed its treatments were effective, though state regulators later surmised otherwise.

“To allow the applicant to draw further ground water from additional wells in the area without adequate protection of the supply would be to permit the contamination of that much more water beyond the vital drinking water standards which must be maintained in Nassau County at all costs,” the health department wrote.

Responding to the application, the state said the county’s objections didn’t warrant denying approval for the new wells but pointedly found that the objections were valid and should prompt investigation and corrective action.

The decision, also left unsealed in the insurance case, is noteworthy as well for including the earliest known concern — 65 years ago — that groundwater pollution on the site would expand in the aquifer below and migrate laterally and vertically.

Nassau’s investigations, the state reported, “indicate that such wastes do not dilute in the ground water as had previously been believed, but that the wastes concentrate as slugs or ribbons which might eventually contaminate the water in public supply wells at a considerable distance.”

But the concerns were not publicized, and Grumman continued to enjoy residents’ esteem.

Its reputation was bolstered further when in 1962 it donated 18 acres to the Town of Oyster Bay for construction of Bethpage Community Park. There was no public mention that a part of the site contained the “remotely located open pit” used as a dumpsite. It took 40 years for that to emerge.

“Back then, anyone who said a bad word about Grumman was risking a punch in the mouth,” Bruce Tuttle, a test pilot who worked for the company for nearly four decades, told Newsday in 1997.

A county public health engineer caught the spirit of the day in a 1966 summary he wrote to Grumman of on-site wastewater sampling: “As the expression goes, ‘You must be doing something right.’ Keep up the good work.”

‘I could even smell it’

At the end of the 1960s, there were multiple signs Grumman would soon face an environmental storm.

California in 1966 enacted one of the nation’s strictest air pollution laws, banning the use of numerous chemicals employed heavily by its aerospace industry, including TCE. Two years later, the state’s lawmakers specifically beat back an industry effort to exempt the solvent.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency was formed in 1970 and the Clean Water Act passed in 1972. By the mid-1970s, other states had passed laws limiting industrial TCE use.

In April 1975, the National Cancer Institute reported that TCE was causing organ cancers in mice. That October, the federal Labor Department proposed limiting nationwide worker exposure to TCE after growing concern that its inhalation could damage the kidneys, heart, liver and central nervous system, and cause cancer.

An Oct. 15, 1975, story in Newsday about the Labor Department announcement included this line: “A spokesman for Grumman said that no TCE is used in its operations on Long Island.”

In fact, its use of TCE was evident. Not only had Grumman utilized TCE for more than 25 years, but by this point it relied on it so heavily — through the vapor degreasers and large liquid spray wands — that it was stored in a 4,000-gallon aboveground tank at one of its plants and placed into drums for recycling.

Grumman had long dried wastewaters containing TCE in its basins. It had dumped the rags soaked with the solvent into pits, including the one that became part of the 18-acre park. All of this had already led to groundwater contamination.

Portions of one plant “were dumping grounds for many exotic metals and unidentified liquid substances,” Brian C. Hickey, a Bethpage resident who worked at the company from 1973 to 1981, observed in 1998.

Hickey, who became a New York City fire captain and died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, further noted, in a public comment on an early cleanup plan, “Grumman, like many other manufacturers, dumped, spilled or mismanaged the control of numerous hazardous materials into the ground.”

He added, “We have lived on the border of a 40-year chemical leak.”

Another “Grummanite” would confirm this in explicit terms.

William Kovarik worked for Grumman for more than 40 years, including at the plant where TCE was stored. He said in a deposition conducted for the insurance lawsuit that the carcinogen had likely leaked from a rotted-out tank bottom into the ground for “years and years and years” in the 1970s before being discovered.

“By the time it got down to the water table, who knows?” he said in 2013, referring to TCE’s ability to permeate the soil and pollute the aquifer before detection. “It really goes down fast.”

Kovarik, a lifelong Bohemia resident who died in 2019 at 82, described the TCE tank as two stories high and 15 feet wide. He said Grumman knew then of worker complaints about its unexplained TCE losses.

At the time the solvent dripped, contaminant removal systems had not been placed on any water supply wells — including those used for drinking — within or beyond the facility.

“I would burp and I could even smell it,” Kovarik said.

County begins probe

In late 1973, the Nassau County Health Department began looking into taste and odor complaints that Grumman had received from workers about its private drinking water supply. The county’s two-year investigation was conducted with no public disclosure.

The report it issued at the conclusion stands out for two reasons.

It presented strong evidence of severe TCE contamination at Grumman. Yet its wording and framing worked to minimize those findings while targeting another company, the neighboring Hooker Chemical Co., which would later gain notoriety as the cause of the pollution at Love Canal in upstate New York.

Hicksville-based Hooker was undoubtedly guilty of damaging the environment: It had dumped vinyl chloride, another carcinogen, that made its way into Grumman wells. Grumman did not use vinyl chloride, which produces polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, for pipes, wire coatings and packing materials. It was flagged as a potential carcinogen in 1974, months before TCE.

But the county’s final report overlooked Grumman’s responsibility for the bulk of the pollution. Striking are subtle changes of wording from a preliminary version of the report dated May 1975 and the final version issued that November.

In the preliminary version, the county concluded that: “the discharge of sanitary and industrial wastes at and in the vicinity of the Grumman Corporation is considered responsible for the degradation in quality of the Grumman Corporation wells.”

But in the final version, the words “at and” are missing from the phrase “at and in the vicinity of the Grumman Corporation.” In the same sentence, Hooker is the only named offender:

“The discharge of sanitary wastes in the vicinity of the Grumman Corporation and the discharge of industrial wastes, particularly those previously discharged by the Hooker Chemical Corporation, is considered responsible for the degradation in quality of Grumman Corporation wells.”

While the [county report] immediately noted the severity of the overall situation, it blamed Grumman for none of it.

Test results of two additional Grumman wells and Hooker’s wastewater supply — first reported in October 1975 — underscore how lopsided this conclusion was.

They showed 50 parts per billion of vinyl chloride in one Grumman well and none in the other. Hooker’s wastewater also had 50 parts per billion of vinyl chloride. While the state had yet to establish a maximum drinking water level for such organic chemicals, in 1977 it would: 10 parts per billion for vinyl chloride and 50 for TCE.

The sample of Hooker’s wastewater contained 80 parts per billion of TCE.

But in one of the Grumman wells it was 500, 100 times today’s limit.

The results — which came out the same month Grumman told Newsday that it did not use TCE — raised strong questions about whether Grumman, rather than Hooker, was the primary source of TCE contamination. Groundwater contamination is typically strongest at its source.

‘I was stunned’

When Nassau issued its final summary, the TCE results were submerged on the next-to-last page. While the document immediately noted the severity of the overall situation, calling it “a most serious instance of … contamination,” it blamed Grumman for none of it. Hooker was named on the first page.

Decades later, two Northrop Grumman employees involved in the company’s cleanup were shocked by the extent of the TCE contamination on Grumman’s grounds, which by this point had been long established as a product of the company’s operations.

In a 2011 email, John Cofman, a senior environmental engineer, estimated that 20,000 gallons, or more than 200,000 pounds, of TCE had been removed from groundwater beneath Grumman’s original 600 acres through on-site cleanup systems. He noted that there could be another 20,000 gallons to go.

“So, think of losing three to four entire 10,000 gallons storage tanks of TCE!” Cofman wrote in the email, another left unsealed in the federal insurance lawsuit. “Just to keep things in perspective!”

“Perspective? How’s this for perspective?” replied the recipient of the email, Kent A. Smith, an environmental, safety, health and medical manager. “The fact that there might have been a total release of 40,000 gallons of TCE just caused my insides to start churnin’ somethin’ fierce!! Man, oh man, that’s a lot of material.”

Cofman replied: “Yes — I was stunned when looking at this.”

But when the contamination at Grumman finally reached the public in 1976, few people registered such alarm over the TCE levels.

As state and county regulators largely blamed Hooker, they downplayed the severity of the overall problem. Grumman denied it had any role.

Meanwhile, the plume grew unabated.

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The year 1976 looms large in the decadeslong saga of the massive toxic plume beneath Bethpage.

That June, Grumman Aerospace not only received a confidential assessment that groundwater contamination was spreading from its sprawling facility, but options on how to tackle the budding crisis.

It chose the least aggressive approach, short of one labeled “Do Nothing.”

When the problem finally emerged publicly, the company continued withholding critical information and maintaining it wasn’t culpable. Today the pollution threatens water supplies for a quarter-million residents of southeastern Nassau County.

Grumman, then Long Island’s biggest employer and a political power, got plenty of help. Throughout 1976, state and local regulators minimized the hazards at the 600-acre site even while advising Grumman to switch its drinking water supply to public wells. And for years after that, the officials falsely blamed another manufacturer for the bulk of the contamination.

This pattern continued into 1990, after proof of Grumman’s responsibility became unavoidable. It was so well established that two federal judges ruled in recent years that Grumman should have informed its insurers of it  earlier and that, partly as a result, the insurers wouldn’t have to cover liabilities from the environmental debacle.

If you’re going to do the minimum you have to do to be in compliance, you get a four-mile-long and two-mile-wide plume.

Richard Humann, president and CEO of H2M architects + engineers of Melville

In 2014, U.S. District Court Judge Katherine B. Forrest relied on internal corporate documents, including the June 1976 confidential assessment from Grumman’s consultant that showed the depth of the company’s knowledge and role.

Just last September, a second district court judge, Lorna G. Schofield, focused even more on the consultant memo as she ruled that the insurers wouldn’t have to cover claims in a newer class-action lawsuit by residents who blame health ailments on the contamination.

“The company’s notice obligation arose by June 1976,” Schofield wrote. “By that time, Grumman knew from regulator and consultant reports that the groundwater was contaminated, Grumman was a likely source of contamination, the contamination could pose health risks, Grumman should look for an alternative drinking water supply other than the facility wells, and finally [that] even aggressive remedial measures may not wholly abate the contamination.”

As consequential as this behavior was for the insurer, it was all the more so for Bethpage and surrounding communities. Years were lost while the plume, and health fears from it, grew.

Northrop Grumman declined multiple Newsday requests for interviews. In the first insurance case, however, it said Grumman not only believed that the other manufacturer was to blame, but that after testing conducted between 1977 and 1980, “regulators believed that no additional investigation of the Bethpage facility was warranted.”

Forrest and Schofield both said any thought that Grumman believed at the time that another company was the cause of the pollution was “unreasonable,” with Schofield further noting that regulators “consistently identified Grumman as a source.”

Since beginning its cleanup efforts, Northrop Grumman says it has spent more than $200 million. Its efforts have largely focused on pollution containment systems on its original properties. That has left local taxpayers and the U.S. Navy — which owned a sixth of Grumman’s site — to pay for most of the  public supply treatments that have been installed over the last 25 years.

“If you’re going to do the minimum you have to do to be in compliance, you get a four-mile-long and two-mile-wide plume,” said Richard Humann, president and CEO of H2M architects + engineers of Melville, the Bethpage Water District’s longtime environmental consultant.

Four options

The stage was set for the critical events of 1976 in the waning days of the year before.

That November, the Nassau County Health Department completed a two-year study on contamination of some of Grumman’s 13 private water wells, a probe that began after complaints from employees about taste and odor problems in the drinking water. The company, in response, had shut several of the wells.

Despite information that pointed to Grumman as a significant cause, the county focused its report on the Hooker Chemical Co. of Hicksville. Hooker abutted Grumman and produced the carcinogenic compound vinyl chloride, which state tests measured in Grumman’s wells at as much as 50 parts per billion.

Mentioned several pages into the report was the discovery of another carcinogen, trichloroethylene, or TCE, a degreaser used by Grumman for decades. In one well its presence reached 500 parts per billion. TCE is now the most prevalent of two dozen plume contaminants.

The health department’s findings weren’t publicly released, but at the department’s request, Grumman tasked Geraghty & Miller, an environmental consulting firm, to assess the problem.

In June 1976, the firm produced the confidential memo, central to the two insurance suits, that tracked the contamination’s significance. It was one of several documents submitted in the first case that was supposed to be sealed and kept secret but that Newsday discovered were not.

To start, the consultant found on Grumman’s property “sources of contamination consisting of basins, lagoons, spills, etc.” While not explicitly naming Grumman as the cause, it noted no other possibilities — and in an attached rendering depicted some of those sources as part of the company’s facility.

Geraghty & Miller warned that contamination had formed into a “slug” in the groundwater below Grumman’s plant. At minimum, it was sinking below the shallowest portion of Long Island’s aquifer — a water-filled layer of rock, gravel and sand that is its sole source of drinking water. The mass was moving toward the next deepest level of the aquifer, which provides the bulk of the Island’s drinkable water.

Most ominously, the firm wrote, “Trace concentrations of contaminants in pumped water may not be indicative of the severity of the overall problem.”

It presented four options:

• “Do Nothing,” which it noted had “no immediate cost” but risked further worsening of the water supply.
• Switch Grumman’s drinking water from its contaminated private wells to the Bethpage Water District’s, with tainted water pumped only for industrial purposes.
• Abandon contaminated wells and drill new ones, with the drawback that these “may also become contaminated in time.”
• Conduct “a ground water investigation,” which while “costly” could identify sources of contamination “so that they can be eliminated,” as well as “provide information on location, direction and rate of movement of slug of contaminated water.”

“It would be unwise for Grumman not to carry out some studies on the source and extent of the contamination,” Geraghty & Miller wrote.

Nonetheless, the report recommended, and Grumman accepted, the second option. That allowed the company to protect its 20,000 workers from drinking any more tainted water but essentially avoided the larger issue: determining the magnitude of the problem and how to fix it.

The scenario left open the risk that, untracked and unabated, the contamination could grow exponentially — as it did. The consultant predicted what that could mean with acute accuracy:

• “Slug may spread both laterally and vertically beneath the property”
• “Neighboring wells may become contaminated over the long term”
• “Further contamination may take place from sources not presently detected”

Schofield’s 2019 ruling cited the memo, as well as the county’s 1975 report, as a benchmark: “The totality of these facts shows that by June 1976, Grumman reasonably understood that it could be responsible for a ‘severe’ contamination spreading into the local water supply.”

A secret exposed

Sal Greco Jr., then a Bethpage Water District commissioner, vividly remembers the phone call he received at home on a Sunday morning in 1976 from Dean Cassell, a Grumman vice president.

“His conversation, basically, was that his employees were getting sick from drinking their water,” Greco, now 81, said recently, recalling the problems as digestive. “So, he said, ‘We have to hook up to the Bethpage water system.’”

After the county report and Geraghty & Miller’s memo, Grumman discretely started switching its private drinking water supply to Bethpage’s. The company had 13 wells, the district nine.

Cassell, now deceased, didn’t mention internal company warnings that the contamination was spreading in the aquifer, Greco said. That would have alarmed the water district.

But by mid-1976, others with more information were already showing plenty of disquiet. Nassau County, knowing the level of toxic compounds in Grumman wells, reached out to the federal Environmental Protection Agency for guidance.

In its response that August, the EPA focused less on vinyl chloride and more on the extreme levels of TCE that had been identified further down in Nassau’s 1975 report. Citing the imminent banning of the chemical in food processing, such as decaffeinated coffee, where levels averaged roughly 60 parts per billion, the agency observed that “a water supply containing 500 [parts per billion of] TCE would, on this basis, be definitely unsuited for drinking purposes.”

Grumman, as it had for wells with elevated ammonia and nitrate levels, closed those with the worst TCE problems.

And, as before, it initially kept this action from the public.

Full disclosure came three months after the EPA’s advisory, when an article in the Albany Times-Union newspaper revealed that “small amounts of the toxic chemical polyvinyl chloride have been found in some municipal and private water systems on Nassau County, Long Island.”

A day later, Newsday reported that not only did officials find polyvinyl chloride (later corrected to vinyl chloride) at Grumman, but also TCE at the 500 parts per billion level.

Newsday offered the company’s first public comment on the pollution, after a state official speculated that it could be among the possible culprits: “A Grumman spokesman denied the company’s own operations were responsible for the contamination.”

Grumman then posted a notice to employees that began, “Contrary to implications in the media on November 27 and 28, drinking water in the Bethpage complex has consistently met the drinking water standards under the State Public Health Law.” The causes of the concern — TCE and vinyl chloride — were not covered by the law until the next year.

The response belatedly noted the company’s abandoning of wells but didn’t mention the high TCE levels found in some.

After this initial disclosure, then-state Assemb. Lewis Yevoli (D-Old Bethpage) recalled speaking to a colleague who had been conversing in an Albany bar with state laboratory technicians. His concern was captured in stark language.

“The sample showed the water was so bad — he used their term — that he told me, you could take the paint off furniture,” said Yevoli, 81, who served in the Assembly until 1991.

He helped convene an Assembly public hearing on the contamination that found “local officials had been derelict” in protecting the water supply.

“As long as I was involved in those days, they never admitted that they caused the problem,” Yevoli said of Grumman. “It turned out to be far more serious than anyone realized.”

Privately, other officials were expressing alarm, too — although the public would hardly know it.

On Dec. 2, 1976, with the crisis at Grumman now in full view, company consultants huddled behind closed doors with state, county and federal representatives. According to notes produced by Geraghty & Miller, a dispute broke out between the EPA and the state. The EPA warned, according to the handwritten notes, “Don’t drink the water,” prompting a state official to disagree, and the EPA to repeat its concern: “no basis for levels that are acceptable.”

The same day, the now-deceased county health commissioner, John Dowling, who was listed as being present for the meeting, stated publicly: “If I lived in the area, I would continue to drink the water. We don’t have any information that the chemicals are harmful in drinking water.”

Clout at apex

That Grumman had a seat at the table among regulators showed its stature as Long Island’s economic powerhouse and a sophisticated political player.

Before political action committees were commonplace, Grumman had one of the nation’s largest. Its corporate PAC gave heavily — nearly $300,000 in the 1980 federal elections alone — to all kinds of candidates, including members of congressional committees overseeing defense spending.

Locally, its influence was omnipresent. “We know that local candidates are going to support Grumman. It’s ridiculous to think they’re going to vote against things that Grumman stands for,” the PAC chairman, Robert E. Watkins, told The New York Times.

George Hochbrueckner, a former congressman from Suffolk County who worked at Grumman facilities in the 1960s and early ’70s, said he understood why officials were deferential.

“They had the clout because they had the employees,” said Hochbrueckner, nicknamed “the Grumman congressman.” “Politically, they were hard to beat up on.”

That sway was hardly equaled by Hooker, even before its toxic dumping caused the 1978 evacuation of Love Canal near Niagara Falls.

There was no doubt Hooker was responsible for the vinyl chloride found at Grumman. But that opened the way for the blame officials placed on the company for the entire contamination crisis, TCE included, though Hooker used the chemical minimally compared to Grumman.

For a decade, the weaknesses of the case were overlooked. Although the lower levels of vinyl chloride in Grumman’s wells had to have come from Hooker — Grumman didn’t use the chemical — in at least one key instance the TCE could not have. Not only did the company dwarf Hooker in sheer size and sheer volume of TCE use, but, as Grumman’s own consultants noted in 1978, at least one of its tainted wells was north of the Hooker plant, away from the flow of area groundwater.

No Hooker representatives were listed as having attended the Dec. 2 meeting between government and Grumman officials. In the Geraghty & Miller notes, Francis Padar, Nassau’s director of environmental health, is quoted as saying, “may be only Hooker as source.”

For more than a decade after, regulators offered up Hooker as the poster child for Bethpage contamination, with Grumman doing nothing evident in news reports or available documents to dispute that.

Regulators, however, sometimes suggested that Grumman wasn’t completely blameless. Padar once did so himself. He issued a little-noticed public statement in December 1976 that named the polluting solvents found at Grumman and offering that the company may have had partial responsibility in putting them into the water.

But a Newsday article that same month captured the message that got through most clearly: “Most public officials speculate that the Hooker Chemical plant in Hicksville, which adjoins Grumman, is the source of the pollution.”

On Dec. 3, 1976, the Bethpage Water District shut its first public supply well due to TCE contamination. In a 1977 letter, cited in the insurance cases but never publicized, it formally blamed Grumman, writing, “currently available evidence indicates that … contamination has arisen by virtue of discharge of waste products from your company into the ground water supply.”

“It was very simple: We knew Grumman was responsible,” Greco, a district commissioner until 2003, said recently.

Northrop Grumman said in a filing with one of the insurance cases that the water district simply “dropped the subject.”

And when the district counsel, Anthony Sabino, spoke to the Bethpage Tribune in 1981, he blamed only Hooker. For the first time, the paper reported, he was sharing “district records of its two-year struggle to force Hooker to pay up to one million dollars for replacement costs” of the contaminated well.

Sabino recalled that the district at the time was taking its cues from the state, which decided to go after Hooker, rather than Grumman. Hooker, he explained, had already moved its operations from the area and therefore was an easier target.

“So the state tried to put the arm on Hooker,” Sabino said, noting that the Bethpage Water District “assisted because we did not care where remediation funds came from.”

“Don’t let anyone tell you Hooker was a major contributor to current issues.”

‘Anomalous spike’

In 1979, the state sued Hooker for dumping the vinyl chloride — and TCE — that polluted Grumman’s wells. Then-DEC regional director Donald Middleton declared to Newsday: “If it was in Grumman wells, it was theirs [Hooker’s].”

He credited Grumman with stopping the spread of contaminants by continually extracting tainted water from its property and using it for industrial purposes.

“We’re just lucky that Grumman is pumping enough water out of the ground to supply a small city, or the chemicals might be spreading through the Island’s water supply,” said Middleton, who did not respond to requests for comment.

While public officials stood by Grumman, it took up its own cause by carefully cherry-picking information it held privately.

In a 1982 public presentation, titled “Grumman and Long Island’s Groundwater: Protecting Future Resources,” the company included examples from a 1978 Geraghty & Miller report on plant industrial wastewater sampling.

The featured page showed that, at midnight, 4 a.m. and 8 a.m., Grumman was discharging an average of no more than four pounds per day of TCE back into the groundwater.

The presentation noted Geraghty & Miller’s conclusion that, “independent of the time of day,” the industrial wastewaters Grumman was putting back into the ground were cleaner than what they pumped out.

The company, however, omitted the prior page of sampling results, which Newsday culled from the full 1978 report left unsealed in the first Travelers Insurance case.

Two days earlier at 4 p.m., during peak plant production, Grumman discharged an average of 17.17 pounds per day of TCE back into the groundwater. That would equal more than a gallon of pure TCE, enough to contaminate 292 million gallons of groundwater, according to a filing by one of the company’s former insurers.

The filing called the omission “a further attempt to deflect blame for the widespread groundwater contamination.” Northrop Grumman said in the insurance case that the reading was an “anomalous spike.”

The full 1978 report contained another detail left out of the public presentation: The consultants attributed the levels of chemicals found to Grumman’s own “housekeeping practices (spills, cleanup of equipment, etc.)”

In the late ’70s, the state could have believed, as Middleton proclaimed, that Grumman’s extensive pumping of industrial wastewater was saving the day, containing the pollution in the shallowest parts of the aquifer. But 30 years later, the company acknowledged that its pumping had the opposite effect.

In a 2009 presentation, Northrop Grumman wrote that it had actually “distributed [contamination] laterally and vertically throughout the region.”

Humann, the Bethpage Water District consultant, said the volume and depth of Grumman’s pumping likely accelerated the pollution’s spread by repeatedly extracting and returning it to the aquifer.

A slow reckoning

As national and state awareness of environmental hazards grew, Grumman’s governmental relationships became less effective.

In 1979, the state established a list of hazardous waste disposal sites, the beginning of its Superfund program to identify and clean industrial contamination. Grumman eventually made the list — one of the company’s drying beds for wastewater sludge alone handled 1,300 tons per year, the state reported in 1980.

Formal notice came in December 1983, when the state warned the company in a letter that it was a “potentially responsible party” for cleaning up pollution at its Bethpage facility and “may be responsible for the release or threatened release of hazardous substances.”

Because the state said it had insufficient data on Grumman’s practices, the effects were minimal — almost no action was required.

But the discoveries kept escalating.

In 1986, the Navy acknowledged that “large volumes of hazardous wastes were stored” on the 100-acre piece of the Grumman site that it owned but that the company operated — and that they were kept, until 1978, “without comprehensive containment safeguards.”

That same year, Nassau public works officials were investigating a countywide water shortage and drilled a series of wells. Near Grumman, they found something other than a “water quantity problem.”

They discovered the plume.

“While public relations was making it a quantity problem, we did a model that proved it wasn’t,” John Caruso, who worked for the county at the time, said in an interview.

The county asked for help from the U.S. Geological Survey. Together, they developed the first formal mapping of the contaminants spreading from Grumman’s site and found them moving in much the way the company’s consultants had predicted a decade before.

“A groundwater plume was found to be sinking and moving south southeast,” the report warned.

“If we would have started [the cleanup] back then,” said Caruso, a former Massapequa Water District commissioner who now serves as an Oyster Bay town public works deputy, “it wouldn’t be what it is now.”

In December 1986, state officials met privately with Grumman and requested that the company investigate whether it had contaminated area water. An internal Grumman memo summarizing the meeting stated that the request “could be the first step leading to a very serious and expensive liability, if it were determined Grumman contributed contaminants to the groundwater and a cleanup of some kind was required.”

Exactly a year later, the state changed its Superfund designation of the company’s Bethpage facility, elevating the risk level: “The reason for the change is as follows: hazardous waste disposal confirmed, groundwater standards have been contravened.”

This forced action from Grumman for the first time. The state reported discovery of TCE levels within the plume on the company’s site at as high as 810 parts per billion, attaching a hand-drawn map that provides the contamination’s earliest known visual representation, with data “strongly suggesting an onsite source.” Those levels would later rise, in some of the untreated, raw groundwater, to the tens of thousands.

Then-company spokesman Weyman Jones responded in Newsday in March 1988: “We don’t agree with their reclassification and we have no evidence of any risk to the environment.”

That year the Bethpage Water District privately told company officials that the second of its public supply wells was contaminated with TCE.

A private reckoning approached.

The company launched its first contamination study of the site that would be overseen by outside regulators. Later in 1988, it confirmed that rather than the vinyl chloride produced by Hooker, TCE and a similar compound, tetrachloroethene, also known as PCE, were the most prevalent contaminants in nearby groundwater.

All silent

Grumman, however, again remained quiet as it took its first remedial steps.

In March 1989, internally acknowledging the situation’s gravity, it opened its first on-site installation to remove contaminants.

By August, the company was deep into private negotiations with the water district. The district wanted money to erect its first similar device, called an air stripper, for TCE-contaminated wells.

That was the backdrop for an Aug. 16, 1989, meeting between a Grumman executive, engineer, attorney and insurance manager and Travelers, the company’s insurers. It was summarized in a particularly consequential Travelers memo, labeled “PRIVILEGED & CONFIDENTIAL” and left unsealed.

The summary began by outlining a brief history of Grumman’s TCE use in an unprecedented way: “Groundwater at south end of [Grumman] complex has contained TCE for a long time. TCE has been used there since 1949,” it reads, building up to: “Data is conclusive that it is Grumman plume which is contaminating the [Bethpage] Water Districts [sic] well.”

After noting that the district wanted $1.3 million from Grumman, the memo emphasized: “No question regarding liability as there are no other direct parties [that] appear to have contributed to contamination yet.”

It was a remarkable conclusion after Grumman’s years of challenging the extent of — and its responsibility for — the pollution.

But it was a private one, still out of the eyes of a public that had watched the company contest efforts to lay the problem at its door.

Instead of debating the facts, we are dealing with the issue.

Jack Carroll, Grumman official, to the Bethpage Tribune in 1990

Instead of a public admission, in May 1990 one of the Grumman officials present for the insurance meeting joined a group interview with the weekly Bethpage Tribune that directly contradicted the memo’s conclusion.

The paper summed up the interview this way: “Grumman doesn’t admit liability on the issue of contaminating Bethpage wells, however Grumman acknowledges that wells on their Bethpage site exceed Nassau County Board of Health standards.”

According to the article, Cassell, Grumman’s vice president of product integrity and environmental protection, further suggested that the contamination either entered the ground in the 1940s through Grumman’s operations or that the company’s pumping may have inadvertently drawn it in from neighboring manufacturing plants.

Another company official, Jack Carroll, added, “Instead of debating the facts, we are dealing with the issue.”

The headline accompanying the story was “BETHPAGE WATER AMONG THE SAFEST; Rumors of Grumman Contamination Pose No Threat.”

This was a last refrain from Grumman’s era of open denial.

Over the next quarter century, it was replaced by a far larger commitment to extracting pollutants from its original property but also by fighting some of the most aggressive measures to address the plume as it spread.

And in that effort, Grumman was often joined by regulators.

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A few years after Grumman Aerospace first acknowledged a measure of responsibility for the significant groundwater pollution in Bethpage, state regulators turned to the company’s own consultants to predict how far it would spread.

The consultants concluded in 2000 that natural processes, coupled with treatments deemed minimal by water providers, would virtually eliminate the toxic plume and the need for a costlier cleanup.

The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation added a cover letter and adopted the report as its own, making it a critical guide to long-term decision-making.

The future did not work out exactly as predicted. Today, concentrations of the most troubling plume contaminant — the carcinogenic metal degreaser trichloroethylene, or TCE — are hundreds of times worse at numerous locations.

The wildly inaccurate projection epitomized how state environmental officials long acted hand-in-glove with Grumman and its successor, Northrop Grumman, in ways that served to limit corporate blame and expenses.

Together, they chronically underestimated what has become Long Island’s biggest mass of groundwater contamination and failed to curtail it almost anywhere beyond the original 600-acre Grumman complex.

There was simply no political will to adequately resource this issue.

Anthony Sabino, Bethpage Water District counsel

Newly uncovered documents show that the state dismissed tackling the plume more decisively from the start of the official cleanup process, in 1990. It continued endorsing lowball predictions even as a key Northrop Grumman manager sounded internal warnings that the pollution had expanded far more than expected.

“Sadly, the plume could have been substantially contained 30 years ago,” said Anthony Sabino, a retired attorney who battled polluters and regulators for more than two decades as Bethpage Water District counsel. “What we are facing is the complete failure of the state under many commissioners and project managers.

“There was simply no political will to adequately resource this issue.”

The state, reversing its longtime approach, recently approved a $585 million remediation, featuring the first full plume containment effort. It mirrors what local water districts essentially called for from the beginning, when the problem’s scope — and cost of fixing it — was far less.

The plan calls for Northrop Grumman and the U.S. Navy, the other responsible party as owner of about 100 acres of the old Grumman site, to foot the bill. Both have argued the plan is not scientifically based.

A new day?

While Grumman made no mea culpa, the 1990s dawned with the company displaying a new cooperation with both regulators and water providers.

In 1990, it quietly agreed to give the Bethpage Water District $1.7 million for the first system it installed to remove contaminants from its public wells. At the same time, the company was expanding a similar effort on its own property.

By 1998, that on-site containment network grew to include a barrier of five extraction wells that pump and treat 5.5 million gallons per day of contaminated water.

Throughout the ’90s and early 2000s, Northrop Grumman was following the state environmental Superfund process for industrial pollution sites, with little outward sign of obstinance.

“We were lockstep with the DEC,” said Dick Dunne, Grumman and Northrop Grumman’s government relations and public affairs director between 1991 and 2002, using the acronym for the state’s environmental conservation department. “They were advising us on what we should and shouldn’t do. And we were listening.”

There were limits, however, and they now stand as critical ones.

Early on, Grumman agreed to stop further groundwater contamination from leaving its property. But with the state’s blessing, it essentially left it to the Navy to address the substantial mass that had already escaped.

Over time, that plume has continued spreading through Bethpage to threaten public water supplies serving communities including South Farmingdale and North Massapequa, as well as parts of Levittown, Seaford and Wantagh.

In 1994, four years after its first agreement with the Bethpage Water District, Grumman paid it $1.8 million for a second contaminant removal system.

Counting maintenance and other associated costs, the company estimates it has paid $5.4 million to the Bethpage district for the two public treatment systems that decontaminate water before it reaches taps.

That compares to more than $40 million for public well treatments paid by the Navy, which also operates the only completed off-site system that extracts contaminants from the plume. (Northrop Grumman hopes to open its first in early 2021.)

For a long time, few in Bethpage knew much of this sort of detail, and Grumman predicted that it could avoid any public outcry in the future.

“In the past, public concern over environmental issues associated with the facility has been minimal,” Grumman’s consultants, Geraghty & Miller, wrote to the state in July 1990, concluding that “heightened public concern over the company’s ability to continue employment” — it still had more than 18,000 workers — was one reason “it is anticipated that the community’s concern over environmental issues that arise … will be minimal.”

‘Aligned’ with Grumman

The relationship between Grumman and the state was sympathetic from the outset of the Superfund process that governs state environmental cleanup efforts. This was the case even after Grumman was bought by Northrop Corp. in 1994 and its presence and workforce on Long Island shrank dramatically.

Referring to state environmental officials, Stan Carey, superintendent of the Massapequa Water District — the next water provider in the path of the plume — observed, “The people running the remedial program almost seemed like, at times, that they were aligned with the Navy and Grumman.”

To chart the extent of the state’s rulings favorable to the company, Newsday reviewed thousands of pages of documents from the voluminous reports issued in compliance with Superfund regulations.

These began after Grumman signed an agreement with the state in October 1990 to develop a Remedial Investigation/Feasibility Study, known as an RI/FS, to probe the extent of the mess and how best to treat it. That would lead to a binding cleanup plan, known as a Record of Decision.

The alliances, disputes and road to half measures began at the start.

Some parties deeply involved in the crisis immediately argued that containing the plume was the fundamental issue. At a December 1990 public hearing on the study, Sabino said he’d “declare war” on regulators if they didn’t fully investigate the groundwater contamination and try to stop its spread.

But the state dismissed that premise.

It said in a 1991 reply to his and other public comments that a full plume containment “would be a waste of time and money.”

“It could make matters worse,” the state wrote. “For example, a public supply well which otherwise would not be impacted by the plume, could become contaminated (i.e. – the plume could be deflected.)”

In their reply, they also dismissed, as not “finely tuned,” the only study that had mapped the spread of contaminants from Grumman’s property. Up until that point, the 1986 finding by Nassau County and the U.S. Geological Survey had been considered a landmark — so significant that it caused the state to elevate the site’s Superfund risk level, kicking off the remedial process.

The decision not to seek full containment reverberated for decades.

“That was a fatal-flaw decision,” said Richard Humann, president and CEO of H2M architects + engineers of Melville, a longtime environmental consultant for the Bethpage Water District. He called it “a conclusion reached with insufficient information,” one that “set the stage for a series of underestimates and a series of minimizing what the potentials could be.”

‘Not considered’ a source

In early 1992, the state issued a fact sheet that made clear the focus of its first formal cleanup plan would be the contaminated soil on the Grumman and Navy grounds, not the plume spreading beyond their borders.

“An offsite groundwater investigation(s) will also be performed (as a separate phase) if it is determined that more data are necessary to complete” the study, the state wrote.

Who would conduct the study? “The RI/FS will be performed by Geraghty & Miller Inc., a local environmental services firm with over 30 years of experience,” officials wrote, without noting the company had worked for Grumman for years.

Geraghty & Miller would become part of Arcadis Inc., an international environmental firm that continues to work for Northrop Grumman.

The state’s Record of Decision, released in March 1995, called mainly for the newly formed Northrop Grumman company to install soil contaminant removal systems on its property, including one near a massive storage tank that had leaked TCE into the ground during the 1970s. The Navy, under a report specific to its property, was required to take similar action.

But the most telling details in the 1995 Grumman decision came from some of the dozens of questions gathered from the public during the hearings the year before.

“Why is a consultant working for Grumman developing a remedy for addressing the groundwater contamination?” one person asked.

The state replied that Grumman was required to hire a qualified consultant and that Geraghty & Miller fit that description. It added that state environmental officials would approve all findings.

“Had a remedy been put in place several years ago, how much less pollution would have migrated off-site, and how much less of a problem would we be facing today?”

“Certainly, additional contamination has migrated off site over the past few years,” officials wrote in response. “However, in the opinion of the NYSDEC, the overall magnitude of the problem has not increased significantly.”

A question posed in another comment was understandable to anyone who had spent time in Bethpage: “Have there been any investigations of properties formerly owned by Grumman (e.g., Bethpage Community Park)?”

The 18-acre plot, on the eastern edge of the company’s grounds, had been gifted to the Town of Oyster Bay by Grumman in 1962. It opened two years later as a sparkling focal point of suburban life, one that eventually included a swimming pool, playground, ice skating rink and ballfield where generations of children gathered.

“You met everybody in town. Everybody went to the ice rink. Everybody went to the pool. Everybody played sports in the park,” recalled Mark Comerford, 67, a Bethpage native. “I basically grew up at that park.”

The state’s confidence in the safety of the park was evident in its response to the public comment. “A direct investigation of the Bethpage Community Park was not conducted,” the state wrote, noting that groundwater monitoring wells had been installed immediately south of the site. “Based upon the current data, the Park is not considered to be a source area.”

A year earlier, the Navy had taken a single sample inside the park as part of a wider investigation into whether soil with the toxic industrial compound polychlorinated biphenyl, or PCB, had blown off its original site. It only tested for the carcinogen, however, at a depth of up to 6 inches and did not find enough to trigger further testing or public disclosure.

Though soil cleanup on Grumman’s property was its focus, the state signaled in the 1995 decision that it would look deeper into the spread of the plume. “A groundwater model has to be developed,” it wrote.

Then, launching a six-year process that mirrored the one just completed, the state and the Northrop Grumman consultants issued a new round of reports specific to the plume. Most notable was another company-authored feasibility study and a second Record of Decision.

During this time, the plume grew by nearly a mile, down past Hempstead Turnpike.

Meanwhile, the company and the Navy agreed, in what a federal judge later called an “informal ‘handshake agreement,'” to divide responsibilities for what was to come.

Northrop Grumman, after funding the Bethpage Water District’s first two public supply treatment systems, focused its efforts on completing and operating its large on-site containment system, part of what it says has been a $200-million remediation commitment over the past 30 years.

The Navy in 1995 paid $1.9 million for Bethpage’s third contaminant removal system. Against a backdrop in which the state and consultants for the company were predicting minimal future plume impacts, the Navy also agreed to fund any similar treatments that might be required, whether off-site containment wells or further public treatments.

To date, the Navy has accrued costs of more than $45 million for the public contaminant removal systems. Its total costs come to more than $130 million, a Navy spokeswoman said.

Public underestimation, private alarm

In October 2000, the state released the feasibility study that led to its plan for dealing with the growing plume.

It serves as a flashing warning sign for how the spread and severity of contamination were profoundly misjudged.

To start, Arcadis estimated that it would take at least three decades for the plume to reach further public water supplies.

It took one.

The report stated that TCE-contaminated groundwater at one public Bethpage well would be reduced to state drinking standards of 5 parts per billion by 2012. Instead, the levels increased to 83 parts — and in 2019 stood at 349.

Perhaps most inaccurately, the feasibility study stated that any portion of the plume not cleaned up by treatment systems proposed or already in place would “undergo natural attenuation.” That meant that the toxic chemicals would ultimately dilute or be removed through various organic physical, chemical or biological processes. As the state determined in 2019, after reversing its approach to the crisis, “it is clear that natural attenuation alone in these areas would not significantly contribute to attaining groundwater quality standards.”

On their own, the feasibility study’s botched projections are glaring enough. They stand out even more when contrasted with the internal alarms set off, almost simultaneously, within Northrop Grumman.

On Oct. 30, 2000, two weeks after the Arcadis report, Larry Leskovjan, then manager of Northrop Grumman’s environmental, safety, health and medical operations, alerted colleagues in an internal memo of a “recent discovery that the contaminant plume has progressed much more closely to the South Farmingdale Water District supply wells than expected.”

The memo is cited in a 2014 decision by U.S. District Court Judge Katherine B. Forrest finding that Grumman’s former insurers would not have to cover environmental damage claims against Grumman, in part because the company kept it in the dark about its exposure.

Leskovjan added that data “strongly suggest[s] that this plume originated from Northrop Grumman property.” The admission was one the company still hadn’t quite made publicly, even as it acknowledged some responsibility to state regulators.

A month later, according to Forrest’s ruling, the company confirmed Leskovjan’s warnings at a meeting with representatives of the Aqua Water District, a private provider (now known as New York American Water) with wells serving Seaford and Wantagh. Northrop Grumman revealed, Forrest wrote, that it “knew that contamination emanating from its Bethpage facility … was expected to eventually contaminate the drinking water supplies of both” that district and South Farmingdale.

In an email three months later, Leskovjan said the water districts were concerned “as a result of recently developed information that indicates [Grumman’s] groundwater plume extends much farther than anticipated.” He later noted that it was his “understanding in 2001 that Northrop Grumman potentially might be responsible for costs associated with insuring a clean water supply” to those districts, Forrest wrote.

The Navy, however, under its “handshake” deal with Northrop Grumman, was the one that ultimately paid those costs — nearly $28 million, according to its records.

Lack of urgency

Leskovjan’s warnings were not truly reflected in the state’s March 2001 Record of Decision on the groundwater plume, its first formal plan for remediating the contamination outside the former Grumman plant.

Even though the plume now covered about 2,000 acres, with its southern edge crossing Hempstead Turnpike, the state did not call for the urgent action local officials wanted.

Estimated to cost $33.6 million, the plan recommended three primary components: continuation of Northrop Grumman’s on-site containment, continuation of the drinking water treatments at public wells in Bethpage and a single new off-site contaminant removal system 4,500 feet south of a former company dumping site, to be funded and run by the Navy.

The unchosen alternatives were far more aggressive. At roughly double the cost, one called for a bank of pollutant extraction wells to rid the groundwater of toxic chemcials as they reached the outermost points of the plume.

The state, however, concluded that permitting and property acquisition would be “difficult to implement” and that building the extensive apparatuses required would be “impractical.” The Navy echoed these conclusions two years later in its own Record of Decision, which it was required to file as a federal department.

One foot per day, it travels …. It was Hempstead Turnpike. Now it’s the Southern State Parkway. Where’s it going to be next?

John Caruso, Town of Oyster Bay public works official

Had any of the alternatives been chosen, local water providers say, the plume could have been largely contained not far south of Hempstead Turnpike, lowering the likelihood that further public wells would have been affected.

“One foot per day, it travels,” said John Caruso, a Town of Oyster Bay public works official who has studied the contamination since he helped Nassau County develop the first plume map in the 1980s.

“It was Hempstead Turnpike. Now it’s the Southern State Parkway,” Caruso said. “Where’s it going to be next?”

The state’s approach, however, was heartily backed by Northrop Grumman and the Navy.

“We support it fully and would strongly object if it were modified in any material way,” John H. Young Jr., a Northrop Grumman vice president, wrote to the state in early 2001. “We would be very concerned if the [proposed plan] were altered to incorporate a full containment option.”

In its own Record of Decision, the Navy concluded, “It is not economically or technically feasible to contain and treat all the contaminated groundwater that has migrated from the [Navy] site to groundwater quality standards.”

A year later, reality hit hard through an unexpected discovery.

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