The Navy’s breach of trust at Calverton

The Navy owes Riverhead more than a cleanup. It owes us the truth.

For years, residents, environmental advocates and local officials have sat through Restoration Advisory Board meetings about contamination at the former Grumman/Navy weapons plant in Calverton. They have listened to updates, reviewed maps, asked questions and pressed for action on PFAS, the persistent chemicals moving through soil and groundwater at and around EPCAL.

Frankly, they’ve gotten a lot of double-talk and tedious presentations of technical data. What they were not told was that the Pentagon’s own projected timeline for completing the key PFAS cleanup study had slipped by more than a decade.

That is outrageous. If it hadn’t been for Sen. Chuck Schumer coming to Calverton last week to demand the Navy take action, we still wouldn’t know about the delay. That’s bad enough. Even worse is how the Navy kept that information from the public.

This was not a single, sudden postponement announced to the public by Schumer. Federal records located on the Department of Defense website and reviewed by RiverheadLOCAL show the projected completion date for the remedial investigation and feasibility study moved in stages. A July 2022 Department of Defense report listed June 2028. As of Sept. 30, 2023, the date had been pushed to September 2036. As of Sept. 30, 2024, the date had moved again, to April 2039.

In other words, the Navy and the Department of Defense did not wake up last week and discover that the remedial investigation and feasibility study for the Calverton cleanup process would take more than a decade longer to complete than originally projected. The federal government began moving that date back years ago.

The community should have been told by the Navy then.

Since the Sept. 30, 2023 dataset compiled by the Department of Defense — the one that showed the projected completion date for the remedial investigation and feasibility study had been pushed back to September 2036 — the Calverton RAB has held six public meetings with Navy representatives. Five of those meetings took place after the projected completion date was pushed back to April 2039. Yet, the Navy never mentioned the delay at any of those meetings.

Members of the Calverton Restoration Advisory Board, including its longtime co-chairperson, were justifiably shocked by the news, especially since they have been consistently pressing the Navy to speed up the process and begin the actual cleanup.

The Calverton Restoration Advisory Board exists for precisely this kind of information. Its purpose is not ceremonial. It is supposed to give the community a window into the cleanup of a contaminated former military site.

Silence in the face of that kind of change is not a paperwork problem or bureaucratic snafu. It is a breach of trust.

Under the federal cleanup process, the remedial investigation and feasibility study must be completed before the Navy selects a final cleanup remedy. The RI/FS is not the cleanup itself. It is the investigation-and-options phase that comes before cleanup. So when the projected completion date is moved to 2039, the public is not being told that shovels will be in the ground then. It is being told the Navy may not even finish defining the problem and evaluating cleanup options until then.

That is unacceptable.

PFAS contamination is not theoretical here. Local officials and advocates have warned that contamination is moving toward the Peconic River. Public water extensions have already cost tens of millions of dollars. Private well owners, taxpayers, water suppliers and the broader East End environment are all carrying the burden of a problem created by decades of military-industrial activity at the site.

Members of the RAB and Riverhead residents and officials have repeatedly expressed frustration and dismay at the slow speed of progress. Navy reps always seem completely unfazed.

The Navy cannot be allowed to treat time as if it were harmless. Every year of delay matters. Every season that contamination continues to migrate changes the facts underground, increases the likelihood the Calverton plume will contaminate the Peconic Estuary, increases future cleanup costs and deepens the public’s distrust.

Riverhead deserves better than a cleanup timeline buried in federal records. It deserves a clear answer, a public explanation and an accelerated plan.