Navy risks public trust, progress in Calverton cleanup

A U.S. Navy official made a stunning admission last month, one that residents and Suffolk County officials had already suspected. For over a year the Navy withheld from the public test results that found dangerously high levels of the chemical PFOS in fish and the waters in Swan Pond near the former Naval Weapons Industrial Reserve Plant in Calverton.

“This was an oversight,” a Navy official said during a June 9 virtual public hearing of the Restoration Advisory Board (RAB), adding, “we will not make this mistake in the future. . . . We need to be collaborating better.”

Yet the Navy is again making the mistake of keeping the public in the dark by threatening to exclude the county from such future “technical” meetings in retaliation for the county supposedly providing draft data and information to media outlets, an accusation a county official denied.

When county officials found out early this year that the Navy had withheld Swan Pond test results, they became irate. Suffolk County Executive Edward P. Romaine threatened in April to “exercise whatever options we have” if the Navy didn’t clean Calverton. The Navy responded by rejecting Suffolk water test results and excluding the county from a May 28 meeting.

Now, Sen. Chuck Schumer, in a letter to the acting secretary of the Navy this past week, wrote that the June 9 virtual meeting “created friction and distrust” between RAB members and the Navy. He requested that future meetings must be in person “for transparency” and to “rebuild trust” between the community and the Navy.

Dating back to the formation of the RAB in 1997, the Navy has delayed cleanup deadlines. Community members are fed up.

“Recent actions by the Navy staff appear punitive,” RAB members told the acting secretary in a recent letter. They said the Navy was excluding county officials from meetings and making meetings onerous in retaliation for speaking publicly to give “alternate points of view about remediation.”

The Navy established RABs like the one for Calverton to build trust and get input from residents. “That’s the purpose of the RAB, not to sit around like a bunch of mute statues,” Adrienne Esposito, an RAB member and the executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment, told the editorial board.

Forever chemicals, called PFAS, pose a serious health risk, and the spread of the two Calverton plumes requires an aggressive and comprehensive remediation plan, not delays and recriminations. Remediating PFAS from groundwater is no longer a revolutionary process on the cutting edge of experimental science. In fact, environmentalists say, it’s become routine although still expensive.

But the Navy’s initiative in Calverton is more of a pilot program than a full-fledged remediation plan, Esposito said. The Navy should listen to county and local experts who are pushing for more expansive plans than the Navy’s which calls for a single extraction well that would pump just 20-40 gallons of water per minute.

Residents’ health and the environment cannot be jeopardized by this petty behavior.

It’s time for the Navy and the RAB to reset their commitment to working collaboratively to develop the best remediation plan, with community input along the way. The Navy must include the RAB and county and state officials in all aspects of that plan and focus on its mission — the Calverton cleanup. So far, the Navy is failing in that obligation.