DEC to test groundwater around site of battery plant fire in East Hampton

Three years after a thermal-runaway fire at a lithium battery power plant in East Hampton, New York State has released a new plan to test groundwater around the facility following a lawsuit charging  soot-tainted runoff contaminated drinking water.

The newly released plan to test water and soil by the state Department of Environmental Conservation comes as Suffolk County is expanding its testing of groundwater to include nearby Georgica Pond and Georgica Cove, county spokesman Michael Martino said. The pond is south of the facility but is linked to the area by a storm drain, he said.

“We want to make certain that any contamination did not travel to other areas,” said Martino.

The DEC’s formal plan to investigate the site, after closing a prior investigation in 2023, includes tests for the already detected toxin PFPrA and 40 other forever chemicals, according to a DEC community update. The state will use seven existing wells and 15 newly drilled ones, noting there are already seven existing wells on the National Grid-owned battery site to the north of the water authority water well field.

The DEC said it also will test water from six wells installed by Suffolk County to the south of the property, and drill eight new wells elsewhere on the property. The DEC said it also plans to take soil samples next to the new wells to "test if PFAS are leaching from the soil into the groundwater at suspected release locations."

Andy Guglielmi, director of environmental remediation at the DEC, in an interview Monday, said the agency is "coordinating really closely" with Suffolk to examine both the battery property and other areas down gradient, including Georgica Pond. 

"They have told us as part of their general PFAS investigation they're going to look at other areas they serve," he said. If the data shows a connection to the PFPrA toxins, he said, "We'll take appropriate actions." 

The DEC has yet to finalize a remediation plan for the contamination, but Guglielmi said that could include soil removal, if found to be a contamination source, groundwater treatment and providing alternate water for those impacted.

But, he cautioned, "It's really to early to say how we are going to remediate anything."

While the DEC asserts "no source of the contamination has been determined at this time," its investigation plan follows a federal lawsuit by the Suffolk County Water Authority that names the battery plant owners, National Grid and NextEra, and the battery manufacturer as the source of the contaminants.

The lawsuit charges that water used to fight the fire ran off from the site and ultimately led to the contamination of four vital drinking water wells about 2,500 feet south of the plant. The authority found levels of PFPrA of up to 560 parts per billion in test water, according to the DEC report.

As a result, the Suffolk authority shut down two wells completely, and put another two on restricted status but  hasn’t used them since late June, heightening a severe water shortage in the Hamptons. The authority said it has not found that specific toxin at any other water wells across its Suffolk territory.

The DEC says about 1.4 million gallons of water were used by internal sprinkler systems to douse the flames, but the water authority, in its lawsuit, estimated 2.2 million gallons were used. The DEC's 2023 report on the fire quotes an investigator observed "the discharge of a large amount of water. So much water in fact, that it started to leak out of the building and pool outside and in the near bye wooded area." 

Suffolk County’s health services department this summer installed new wells in the neighborhood just south of the plant and results have shown PFPrA as high as 1,170 parts per billion, well above the state health department’s preliminary screening level of 3 parts per billion for the site.

Thus far, Martino said, tests of private water wells in homes taken since the lawsuit was filed have not detected toxins above the state screening level. Newsday has not seen copies of those results, and no residents with private wells have yet been contacted. Around 30 residents have private wells in the area.

County and local officials and residents say the state should have conducted extensive testing in 2023, and potential remediation directly after the fire, because state investigators were aware of the large amount of soot-tainted runoff pooling off-site from the battery facility.

The DEC required only that NextEra make five soil-boring samples a foot below the runoff surface in October 2023, four months after the fire. Because those borings concluded "it is apparent that there are no adverse impacts to the soils as a result of the battery fire discharge water," according to NextEra’s report, the DEC didn’t require groundwater testing, and closed its investigation in 2024.

The DEC's Guglielmi noted the tests for PFAS weren't done on the East Hampton fire because there "was no firefighting foam used at that point in time."

But another battery plant fire that same year, in upstate Chaumont, also saw large amounts of water used to contain a fire, and groundwater testing was conducted there. Asked why the DEC required testing in Chaumont but not East Hampton, the agency, in responses to Newsday, said:

"Out of an abundance of caution," the DEC said it "retained a contractor to sample eight existing potable wells in proximity" to the plant immediately after the fire. Despite two sets of samples of those wells over six months, the DEC said, "No contaminants of concern were detected." 

The analysis would appear not to include PFPrA, the toxin found in East Hampton, as the DEC notes in its recent report that neither the Suffolk water authority nor "any other public water supply in New York" monitored for that compound prior to this year.

Si Kinsella, a Wainscott resident, called the DEC’s 2023 investigation "woefully deficient." In 2024 he wrote letters to the Town of East Hampton and the DEC requesting that groundwater testing be conducted at the site, to no avail, until now, he said.

Yet he said he remains optimistic the DEC test plan could help identify sources of toxins and remediate the area.

"It sounds very promising so long as they release all the signed laboratory reports so the public can review and scrutinize them," said Kinsela, a forensic auditor. "They should have done this in the beginning and it’s backfired hugely because they’ve cut so many corners."

By Mark Harrington

mark.harrington@newsday.comMHarringtonNews

Mark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.