BROOKHAVEN, N.Y.—The crowd grew restless at Brookhaven Town Hall on Long Island as residents voiced their concerns about groundwater contamination from a nearby landfill that has spread beneath parts of their community.
At the meeting in late March, speakers criticizing the landfill’s operations were met with applause and shouts of support from the audience.
Monique Fitzgerald and the organization she co-founded, the Brookhaven Landfill Action and Remediation Group, have urged the town to close the landfill. Fitzgerald, a lifelong resident of North Bellport, a hamlet within Brookhaven, and other residents have been concerned about the contamination for decades.
“I am disappointed,” Fitzgerald told town officials. “You just wasted our time with this presentation.”
The contamination plume extends roughly 8,000 feet southeast from the landfill, according to the Town of Brookhaven, which owns the structure. Though it has not reached any drinking water sources, it has spread to the groundwater beneath homes and roadways, and a portion of it discharges into the Beaver Dam Creek, according to a report the town submitted to state regulators .
Town officials and contracted engineers evaluated several potential responses, including immediately closing the landfill or pumping out contaminated groundwater for treatment.
Instead, officials recommended what they described as the most practical and cost-effective measures: expanded monitoring of the contamination and connecting some homes with private drinking wells to the municipal water supply.
The Town of Brookhaven did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
North Bellport and Brookhaven have been designated as disadvantaged communities by the state. The classification recognizes heightened vulnerability to environmental hazards due to demographic, health and socioeconomic factors.
Lynne Maher, a Brookhaven resident who says she lives near the contaminated groundwater, felt the town was toying with people’s lives.
“The town cannot be trusted,” she said, accusing town officials of using “scare tactics.”
“Anything … Could Be in There”
The 270-foot-tall Brookhaven landfill, which opened more than 50 years ago, towers over nearby communities. It has six so-called “cells,” which are operational units that divide large landfills. Currently, only one “cell” is still accepting waste—mostly waste incineration ash. The first three cells, which were all closed before 1995, accepted solid waste.
When a landfill is operational, moisture and rainwater can soak the waste, creating contaminated runoff. Today, the liquid is collected and pumped out of the landfill using a dedicated collection system and storage tanks. But the landfill’s earliest cell was built before the current regulations were in place.
Due to inadequate liners in earlier cells, the mixture, also called leachate, has leaked into the groundwater in the surrounding area. The spread of the contamination is commonly known as a “plume.”
As confirmed by state regulators, the groundwater contains levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS or “forever chemicals,” above New York’s standards for groundwater.
PFAS chemicals are found in consumer and industrial products—and they’re very difficult to break down. Scientists have detected them in soil, water, fish and even human blood, though their effect on human and animal health are still being studied. According to the EPA , exposure to these chemicals can adversely affect reproductive health, child development and increase the risk of certain cancers.
Though the town’s report asserts that the historical use of PFAS in consumer products makes it difficult to attribute the contamination to the landfill, state regulators have urged the town to acknowledge that the landfill is “the only conclusively identified source of emerging contaminants” for the area beneath it, in their comments on the original report.
Regulators also confirmed elevated levels of 1,4-dioxane, an industrial solvent. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the chemical “ poses an unreasonable risk to human health ,” and has been linked to higher cancer risks when present in drinking water.
“We’re talking about landfill leachate that can contain many hundreds of different man-made chemicals,” said Jennifer Epstein, a freshwater ecologist who is now the director of science at New York River Watch, a group advocating for better water quality.
“Anything really that’s been used in commerce and has gone into some type of consumer good … could be in there,” she said.
U.S. Geological Survey scientists first detected groundwater contamination at the Brookhaven landfill in 1983 .
In 2022, sampling required by new landfill regulations again confirmed the presence of the plume. The state Department of Environmental Conservation ordered the Town of Brookhaven to investigate the plume and develop “corrective measures” to remediate or limit the…
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