Dig at Bethpage Community Park finds objects but no new chemical drums
A member of the work crew searching last month for more material buried at Bethpage Community Park. On Wednesday, contractors found various buried objects but no additional chemical drums. Credit: Peter Frutkoff
State and town officials Wednesday said Northrop Grumman contractors digging for underground objects at Bethpage Community Park — the former Grumman Aerospace dumping ground — found various pieces of concrete and metal but no additional chemical drums.
The state Department of Environmental Conservation said objects discovered where “anomalies” were suspected included scrap metal rods, concrete, metal flashing, a metal pipe and a buried stormwater grate. Contractors had previously detected the objects using ground-penetrating radar.
On Wednesday, the DEC said it will “continue to provide rigorous oversight of Northrop Grumman’s efforts during this process as well as other ongoing cleanup activities at this location,” which include subsurface drilling and sampling to determine the extent of contamination and presence of any additional drums buried there.
Oyster Bay Supervisor Joseph Saladino said in an interview Wednesday that it was unclear when those materials were buried.
“Whether it was done during the Grumman process, or during when the baseball field was built, we have no way of knowing,” said Saladino, who repeated calls for a complete scan of the park outside of the areas already remediated by the town.
The underground objects, which state officials initially referred to as “potential anomalies,” were observed on radar scans after 16 concrete-encased chemical drums were unearthed from a pit in the ballfield area of the park where Northrop Grumman contractors are involved in an ongoing remediation effort.
Northrop Grumman did not immediately respond to a request to comment.
Grumman contractors in late March discovered the first layer of concrete-encased drums under the park’s former ballfields while drilling a well to check an existing soil sampling system at the park. Two other layers of drums were found in the following days.
The DEC has said results from soil and drum samples show petroleum hydrocarbons, metals such as chromium, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and chlorinated solvents.
State officials said those results are expected since the drums were found in the former settling pond areas used by Grumman when it was in operation. The DEC has not yet made the final test results of the drums and surrounding soil public, pending review.
DEC interim Commissioner Sean Mahar said in a statement last week the agency is “not pleased with what we found at the ballfield,” referring to the chemical drums, adding the agency is overseeing the work at the site “to make sure that there isn’t a risk to public health and the environment.”
Joseph Ostapiuk covers the Town of Oyster Bay and the City of Glen Cove. He joined Newsday in 2023 after spending more than six years at the Staten Island Advance/SILive.com.