Category: Long Island

Black History Month is an opportunity both to look back and to look forward. To understand what that really means on Long Island, Newsday recently posed a single question to members of the black community of all ages – what do you wish you could tell your 18-year-old self? From doctors and ministers to politicians and activists, from millennials to senior community leaders, and from our own staff, here’s what they told us.

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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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