Suffolk County Water Authority

"We're not going to let the public be the pawns in a water battle." A decade-old dispute simmering just beneath the surface has come to a rolling boil and residents in a remote section of Manorville worry about getting caught up in a fight that could delay their community’s access to public water.

A 2009 letter from the Suffolk County Water Authority to the State DEC is 'disrupting the sale of the property at EPCAL,' the town board said in a letter to the water authority today.

The head of the Suffolk County Water Authority wrote to the Secretary of the Navy today offering to provide public water to the homes in Manorville and Calverton south of the former Grumman site, where toxic chemical contaminants have been detected in private residential wells.

Testing by the Suffolk County Department of Heath Services found PFOS, PFOA and a host of other contaminants in drinking water wells in Manorville south of the former Grumman facility.

With standards now in place in New York for "emerging contaminants," the county health department will have to test homeowners' wells for them and homes where wells exceed the new standards will be eligible for special filtration systems.

Since at least the late 1990s, the Riverhead Water District has built its current distribution system without permits required by state law, installing miles of water mains to serve hundreds of residential and commercial developments across the Town of Riverhead.

The testing plan came out of a meeting yesterday morning at the water authority’s office in Oakdale. It's the first step to securing funding needed to bring public water to the area.

After years of request for public water by Manorville residents, the town board last night took the first step to provide the service, after learning the SCWA is now exploring bringing water to the area.