EPA names new Superfund site in Nassau

Long Island has a new Superfund site -- a roughly 250-acre swath of eastern Nassau County where industrial pollution has fouled drinking water wells that supply more than 36,000 residents.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency announced the designation Thursday, along with 14 other U.S. sites added to the agency's National Priorities List.

There are now 26 Superfund sites on Long Island. The EPA program investigates and cleans up some of the country's most severely contaminated and abandoned hazardous waste sites.

The new local site includes parts of Hicksville, New Cassel, Westbury, Hempstead and the Salisbury section of Westbury where chlorinated solvents were detected in groundwater hundreds of feet below the surface.

Estimated at more than 10 million square feet in size, the pollutant plume stretches from Westbury to just east of Route 107 in Hicksville.

EPA officials said chemicals commonly used as degreasers and dry-cleaning solvents have penetrated the Magothy Aquifer -- Nassau County's primary source of drinking water -- and contaminated 11 drinking water wells in Hicksville, the Town of Hempstead and Westbury.

"It's pretty serious stuff," said EPA spokesman John Senn.

Repeated, direct exposure to trichloroethylene and other chlorinated solvents found in groundwater at the site can damage the liver, kidney and central nervous system, EPA officials said.

Water from those wells has been treated to remove the chemicals. Senn said those measures addressed the main human health concern about the site -- "the water itself."

But officials have not yet been able to fully identify where the pollution, which first showed up in wells in 1988, came from.

The New Cassel industrial area in the Town of North Hempstead sits north of two contaminated wells that supply the Town of Hempstead's Bowling Green Estates water district. The state Department of Environmental Conservation has investigated 17 facilities there, and some systems to remove chemicals from groundwater were installed.

Still, the heavily developed area around the plume includes hundreds of contaminated sites that could be sources, according to state and federal investigators.

With few culprits, water districts have a tough time recouping the costs of installing expensive treatment systems.