Monitoring of plume preferred by town

An informative session on the mitigation of the Brookhaven Landfill was held by the Town of Brookhaven on Friday, March 27 at 5 p.m.

Approximately 150 people attended and filled the seats of the audience.

Following the public session, the Town of Brookhaven stated they would hold another 10 days for public comment (i.e., April 7), the platform of which was accessible by a QR code on physical poster materials at the rear of the meeting.

A significant portion of the meeting went over the history of the landfill from its opening in October 1971, the town’s takeover in 1977, and the subsequent capping of five of the six cells.

A representative of Cornerstone Engineering & Geology, PLLC, stated the remaining open areas of cell 6 are covered every day to mitigate the waste runoff into the soil (i.e., leachate, a toxic liquid, often black and odorous, formed when water percolates through waste in landfills, extracting dissolved contaminants like heavy metals, organic acids, and PFAS).

As an example, capped cell 1, which is 75 acres, is covered with a 20 millimeter PVC baseliner, an upgrade from the previous capping materials in the 1960s like ash.

Tom Fox from D&B Engineering, employed by the town, referred to the Brookhaven landfill as the “most studied landfill.”

Fox said that groundwater, leachate, and surface water underwent quarterly testing. At this point, a number of audience members asked for the information to be given in “layman’s terms.”

A six-point feasibility study was announced with varying degrees of cost. The one recommended and most fiscally conservative was a plan to continue the monitoring of section 13, the last operating portion of cell 6.

After approximately a one-hour and 15-minute presentation, audience members were given three minutes each to speak their concerns. The Town of Brookhaven officials stressed that they would not directly address concerns brought up at this time, but would provide a response once the public comment period ended.

Lynn Moore, a 37-year resident of Brookhaven Village, was the first speaker. “I really believe that monitoring by an entity that falsely represented the plume initially… I think that the town cannot be trusted for monitoring… So obvious that is about money, not people’s lives or children’s health.”

Monique Fitzgerald, the co-founder of BLARG, the Brookhaven Landfill Action and Remediation Group, that was created in 2020 following the Black Lives Matter movement, said, “We would not be here if it wasn’t for our group pushing… you guys were monitoring and doing nothing, you knew about this plume for a long time, you keep saying it’s an historic plume, but the reason it’s an historic plume is because you have done nothing about it. I am upset, I am disappointed, we have elected officials for a reason and none of them are here today… you just wasted out time with this presentation, you haven’t shown us anything that we didn’t already know… The Suffolk County Water Authority has been charging us $20 per bill, that’s not new… You are misrepresenting the plume—actually, you have no pictures of the plume in the exhibit. People came to see where the plume is and you have not showed us.”

Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment, said, “We have been working on the landfill and plume issue for 15 years and I have to tell you, never in my life have I been more disappointed in the Town of Brookhaven… This is the type of thing that causes the public go insane. We came here expecting to hear a plume remediation plan and we did not hear one. You presented alternatives to us, none of which cleaned up the plume. You had the nerve to tell us monitoring is the solution. That’s like saying it’s ‘only a little bit of poison.’”

Nicole Jean Christian, chair of environmental justice at the Brookhaven NAACP, said, “This is not about any of y’all. Y’all here for a job. This is not about you, this is for posterity… This presentation was nothing new; we understand the information you provided we were coming hear to hear about the plume and what was going to be done and you completely circumvented that process… Three questions:  Number one, why does the taxpayer get to vote? Number two, what it cost to put is what it’ll cost to take out, where you got the money to put it in, get more money from them and take it out… We at the NAACP know that the main variable to determining where these things go is race. If this was a white, upper-class community, we would not be having this discussion. This is not the end the people have the power; we’re on the right side of history, justice is not being done, the elected officials need to know that everyone that’s here that’s elected, elections are funny things, never get comfortable in your seat if you are not on the right side of history.”