DEC officials told members of the Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee on Saturday that they are still working to line up contractors to begin drilling monitoring wells and examining properties around the East Hampton Airport.
They also said they are still working on getting permission to access some of the privately owned properties that fringe the airport.
It’s scattered around, so we have to follow the groundwater data,” said Karen Gomez, a water remediation engineer for the DEC. “We don’t have someone saying, ‘Oh, we dumped something here.’ So we’ll use the groundwater flow to lead us there.” Ms. Gomez said the contamination that is wending its way southward with groundwater is pulled apart and in different directions by wells and irrigation systems that vary in their impact seasonally, making the calculations even more complicated.
East Hampton Town officials are already trying to map the area of the hamlet that could ultimately be affected by the contamination, and anticipating that it will continue to spread.
The town intends to create a new water district for the hamlet, which will allow applications for grants from the state to help pay for the cost of installing water mains throughout the area—a project that could cost upward of $10 million.
The town has said it will back the effort financially to get it started as soon as possible, rather than waiting for the grant funding.
Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said last week that installing the mains throughout the hamlet would take four to five months, once the work has begun, but that houses would be able to hook up to mains as they are installed, so the wait would be shorter for some.
Some of the Wainscott residents present on Saturday also pointed fingers of concern at a Wainscott Sand & Gravel former sand mine.
But Suffolk County Department of Health toxicologist Amy Juchatz said water testing around the pit has not presented any evidence of water contamination.
All of the restaurants in Wainscott have had their wells tested and none has been found to have contamination above the federal current health advisory level, she said.