SOURCE:
Denise Civiletti - November 1, 2024
The Defense Department's new policy allows the Navy to further delay action to remedy drinking water contamination by plume migrating off Calverton site.
It’s easy to comply with the rules if you’re the one writing them.
That was the sentiment among angry community residents and local officials at a meeting with Navy representatives in Riverhead Tuesday night, convened to discuss the cleanup of groundwater pollution caused by operation of the former Grumman site in Calverton.
Residents who’ve been waiting months to hear the Navy’s plans for complying with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s tough new drinking water standard for PFAS contamination learned at the meeting that the Department of Defense has adopted a standard all its own — and it’s three times higher than the maximum limit adopted by the EPA in April.
Addison Phoenix, the Navy Project Manager for the Calverton cleanup, announced the DOD’s “policy value” for PFAS: 12 parts per trillion, three times the federal EPA’s drinking water limit of 4 parts per trillion.
Pressed to explain why the DOD would not comply with the new federal rule or how it chose the three-times threshold, Phoenix said she had no information.
“Where did 12 ppt come from?” Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment in Farmingdale, asked Phoenix during the meeting. Esposito said she had not heard of any other agency using 12 ppt.
“Is that a number that the DoD created? Is this a health standard number? Where did you get this number from? And why would the DoD have a number that’s different than the EPA, which is science-based, and health-based,” an incredulous Esposito asked. “Is this just a number of convenience?”
“The DoD value of three times the EPA MCL is the value we’re authorized to use,” Phoenix replied. “I cannot tell you very much about the background of that.”
Further, Phoenix said, none of the private drinking water wells contaminated with the toxic forever chemicals emanating from the former Navy plant had PFAS levels higher than the DOD’s 12 ppt policy value.
According to a Sept. 3 policy memo issued by the Department of Defense, PFAS contamination must exceed the 12 ppt policy value in order for cleanup to be prioritized by DOD.
The 12 ppt number is something “you just made up,” Riverhead Water District Superintendent Frank Mancini objected, arguing that the Navy’s presentation was “misleading.”
“You do have detections above 4 ppt in private wells right now on River Road that you guys know your plume is causing,” he said. “So you’re presenting this like, ‘No big deal. It hasn’t hit our action level.’ But you just made the action level up,” Mancini said.
“You do have people being exposed through their private wells from your PFAs. I just want the people to understand that,” he said.
“When you can make up your number, it’s easy to have no detections,” Mancini said.
Mancini is a member of the Calverton Restoration Advisory Board, which acts as a community liaison with the Navy on cleanup of the superfund site. The advisory board has been waiting since May to find out how and when the Navy would implement the EPA’s stringent new rule setting a maximum drinking water level of 4 parts per trillion for most PFAS, harmful substances known as “forever chemicals,” are linked to deadly cancers, impacts to the liver and heart, and immune and developmental damage to infants and children, according to the EPA.
Extensive PFAS contamination exists in the soils and groundwater at the former U.S. Navy-owned manufacturing plant in Calverton, operated by a Navy contractor, Grumman Corporation/Northrop Grumman, from 1954 to 1996. PFAS contamination has been confirmed in groundwater at the southern border of the former aerospace manufacturing site, where the Navy has a fence-line monitoring system in place.
As Mancini forcefully noted during the meeting, the chemicals have been found in private residential drinking water wells south and east of the site.
PFAS have also been detected in fish caught in portions of the Peconic River south of the former Navy plant, prompting the state health department last year to issue advisories regarding the consumption of fish caught in that area of the Peconic.
For years, the Navy was reluctant to acknowledge the migration of chemical pollution in groundwater flow from the site and it has resisted accepting responsibility for off-site cleanup.
The Navy also maintained it was not obligated to comply with New York State’s drinking water limit of 10 parts per trillion for PFAS. The federal EPA had no maximum contaminant level at all for PFAS until it finalized the new rule in April, setting an MCL of 4 ppt.
Navy reps previously argued that the Navy could only use the federal EPA’s 70 ppt lifetime health advisory for PFAS in determining what cleanup actions were necessary. But when the EPA in June 2022 drastically reduced its lifetime health advisory, which had been established in 2016, from 70 ppt to 4 parts per quadrillion — a level so low it cannot even be detected — the Navy said it would continue to rely on the old EPA health advisory level to rule out intervention in areas near its former Calverton plant.
Environmental advocates see a pattern in the military’s response.
The Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit environmental and health advocacy organization, called the DOD’s stance “predictable but disgraceful.”
The decision “lets the Pentagon off the hook” for supplying, in a timely manner, as much safe water as it would need to if it followed the stricter limits, the organization said in a press release. It avoids having to immediately provide safe drinking water to communities near dozens of bases in at least 21 states, where PFAS have been detected above the federal limits but below the three-times threshold, the organization said.
Esposito, who is also a member of the Calverton Restoration Advisory Board called the Navy’s new position “insulting and demeaning.”
“This tells the public that they are bullies and don’t care about us,” Esposito said in an interview Thursday.
After the EPA announced its final rule establishing an MCL for PFAS in April, a Calverton Restoration Advisory Board public meeting scheduled for May 7 was canceled. The RAB had asked the Navy to discuss at the May meeting how it would respond to the EPA’s new rule. Phoenix replied in an email that the Navy could not discuss PFAS cleanup because it was waiting for the Department of Defense “to issue policy” on how the strict new federal drinking water standards and lifetime health advisories would be incorporated into the PFAS cleanup plan for the Calverton site. The Calverton Restoration Advisory Board meeting would be rescheduled, Phoenix said. It finally took place Oct. 29 at the Residence Inn in Riverhead.
On Tuesday, Phoenix said the Navy will continue to collect more samples for testing. The Navy will be looking at all the data it has collected and will “re-evaluate what a potential resampling effort might need to look like or what potentially the footprint might need to change to,” she said.
The Navy is in the process of doing that evaluation and will update the community on it and any additional sampling it plans to conduct at the next RAB meeting in January, Phoenix said. A date for that meeting has not yet been announced.
