The Navy is wrong to let Calverton become Bethpage

Suffolk County Executive Edward P. Romaine fired a shot across the U.S. Navy's bow last week.

At a community meeting in Calverton, Romaine threatened to sue because two toxic plumes at the former Naval Weapons Industrial Reserve Plant are spreading forever chemicals, or PFAS, and endangering the region's water. The Navy has delayed cleanup, Romaine said.

"We are not without options," he said. "We see movement, or we're going to exercise whatever options we have."

Read between the lines: Clean up the plumes — now — or Suffolk will sue.

The Navy has a terrible track record on Long Island of lying about pollution caused at the former Grumman site in Bethpage. And in Calverton, as far back as 1997, when the Navy first created a community advisory board, the Navy knew pollution at that site was a problem and promised to clean it up.

In late 2024 the Navy found high levels of a forever chemical in fish in Swan Pond, but it didn't tell Suffolk until March that fish from the pond were potentially dangerous. The county then installed "No Fishing" signs.

"It's criminal. They knew people have private wells. They knew people fish out there," Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment, told the editorial board.

The delay in addressing the Calverton site is dangerous and unconscionable, though not without precedent.

The Bethpage imbroglio, which took the Navy and Grumman decades to own up to and led in 2020 to a $406 million cleanup plan, is a poor exemplar to follow. A 2020 Newsday investigation found that both Grumman and the Navy knew since the mid-1970s that toxic chemicals from its facilities have been causing groundwater contamination in Nassau.

The Navy acted — eventually — in Bethpage after much political pressure. Why the delay with Calverton — also a former Grumman site, and now Enterprise Park at Calverton — which is an easier job than Bethpage's cleanup because extraction wells will only have to be sunk around a tenth of the depth? Esposito said wells in Bethpage were up to 575 feet deep, and she estimated that wells in Calverton would only need to be dropped 40-50 feet.

But the semantics of these details misses the point — work has yet to start, even though the Navy knows the plumes are expanding at a rate of about a foot a day.

The Environmental Protection Agency's website says PFAS can increase cancer risks, negatively impact the body's immune system, cause developmental delays in children, and more. They are found in raincoats, firefighting foam and even fast food wrappers. There are thousands of contamination sites across the country, several of them on Long Island.

Removing PFAS from the environment, however, is relatively easy, environmentalists say. The process involves installing extraction wells at the edge of a plume and at the plume's "hot spots" to prevent further migration while using carbon filters to remove PFAS. It's a method that has been used across the country since the early 2000s.

"Bethpage was a long, complicated and expensive process," Esposito said. "Calverton is like cake compared to that one."

In 1997, the Navy held its first Restoration Advisory Board meeting for Calverton. According to the Navy's website, the Calverton RAB "serves as an open public forum where the Navy and regulatory agencies share information with official RAB community members about environmental programs ..." The meetings are public, and minutes are posted online.

There have been 62 meetings since 1997. Since then, the community has been fed delays.

In the transcript of the first RAB meeting on Oct. 16, 1997, Navy officials talked about economic development and transferring the 3,000-acre property to the Town of Riverhead except for a 250-acre parcel for a remediation building, but only 20-30 acres had soil contamination.

The Navy's Installation Restoration Program at Calverton, officials admitted then, was created because "unacceptable ways of handling wastes and disposable wastes were found to be acceptable," a Navy official said, according to the transcript. "This was back at a time when war, and things like that, were more of a public concern than the environment."

When asked if chemicals in the ground were serious, the official responded: "It is hard to put 'serious' in context. ... But none of the sites really are posing any immediate risks to the local community."

Later, when estimating how long an environmental impact statement would take, another Navy official said: "Can I give you a date standing right here, right now? No, I can't, unfortunately. But I will tell you that it has been highlighted, and it does have a white light glowing on it as we speak. ... I'm hoping that it won't be very much longer before that process is finally done."

That process, Esposito said, "could start tomorrow and take four years, not over 30."

Romaine needs to stay the course in his fight with the Navy, but this is an all-hands-on-deck moment for Suffolk and the state. Leaders at all levels of government, including environmentalists and the Island's congressional delegation, need to enlist tens of thousands of residents to pressure the Navy.

A massive political pressure campaign worked in Bethpage. If the Navy continues to delay taking responsibility at Calverton, Romaine must turn his threat into action.