In a letter on Tuesday, East Hampton Town Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez told NextEra Energy to cease operations at its 3 Cove Hollow Road East Hampton Energy Storage Center by Friday.
It was the latest of at least four letters, including two within the past week, that the supervisor has sent to Gary Morris, vice president of business management for NextEra, since the end of July.
The company has yet to remove Novec 1230 from the facility. Novec is a chemical identified by the State Department of Environmental Conservation as the cause of contaminated drinking water found in four Suffolk County Water Authority wells.
In May, the water authority filed a federal lawsuit against NextEra, LG Chem, and LG Energy Solutions, alleging that a May 2023 fire at the facility led to the unconfined release of over two million gallons of water. The D.E.C. has confirmed that when the water mixed with the waterless fire suppression agent Novec 1230, it broke down into PFPrA, a short-chain “forever chemical,” which has now been detected in drinking water in the affected area.
The chemical’s effect on human health is not well known. The D.E.C. said 5,000 pounds of it was released in extinguishing the fire.
Mr. Morris met online with Ms. Burke-Gonzalez, over Microsoft Teams, on Friday, according to Tuesday’s letter, in which she told him the facility “should cease operations.”
It is not clear if the town has the authority to shut the facility down on its own.
Mr. Morris dodged a meeting with the supervisor that had been scheduled for Sept. 22, the same day the D.E.C. presented its findings to the town board tying NextEra to the contamination.
Patrick Derenze, the town’s public information officer, offered “no comment” this week when asked if the meeting was rescheduled, and did not mention that the two of them had met online on Sept. 25.
“I am disappointed to have received your September 18, 2026, letter canceling our scheduled September 22, 2026, meeting at Town Hall,” Ms. Burke-Gonzalez wrote to Mr. Morris last Thursday. “Your letter states that the ‘matters raised in your letters are being taken seriously,’ yet nothing has been done to date, including disposing of the Novec 1230 outside the Town as we demanded occur no later than September 18, 2026.”
She then extended the deadline to Friday (Sept. 25) for its removal, yet the chemical remains.
In Tuesday’s letter, the supervisor acknowledged that NextEra Energy has now agreed to remove the Novec 1230 from both the 3 Cove Hollow Road facility and another owned by NextEra, off Fort Pond in Montauk, by approximately Oct. 9, but warned that “that step alone is insufficient.”
“In addition, to protect the well-being of East Hampton residents, the Town requires immediate interim remedial measures at the 3 Cove Hollow Road facility,” she wrote. “Those measures should include excavation and off-site disposal of all impacted soil at a licensed disposal facility outside the Town of East Hampton, followed by endpoint sampling.”
More sampling, at five-foot intervals, should be conducted, she said, to see if further remediation of soil was necessary, as well as remediation of “on-site groundwater.”
These latest demands follow past demands that NextEra may or may not have followed. On July 31, the town gave the company a month to “develop a revised final emergency action and safety plan,” including a “hazardous waste management plan” and to “correct the record and certify the accuracy of the spill containment representation.”
In the same letter, the town gave the energy supplier two months to “design and install engineering controls that capture and hold all fire water and all fire-related runoff,” and “provide a study of the facility’s necessity for the East End electric grid.”
Asked whether it was addressing the demands, NextEra did not respond before The Star went to press.
