The East Hampton Energy Storage Center, which caught fire in 2023, and as a result, according to a recent lawsuit filed by the Suffolk County Water Authority, leaked perfluoropropionic acid, a so-called “forever chemical,” into the groundwater and the water authority’s nearby wells is not unique in the Town of East Hampton.
In fact, another similar facility, owned and constructed by the same company, NextEra Energy, operates steps from Fort Pond in Montauk. It’s squeezed onto a thin strip of land on North Shore Road that separates the pond from Fort Pond Bay.
It was built in 2018 after a divided planning board approved its construction (the vote was 4 to 3) the year after the East Hampton facility on Cove Hollow Road was approved. The deciding vote was cast by Ed Krug, the current chairman of the planning board.
Ian Calder-Piedmonte, now a town councilman, but then a member of the planning board, also approved the project, which also received variances from the town’s zoning board of appeals.
It began operations in early 2019.
During its 2017 site plan and special permit review in front of the East Hampton Town Planning Board, Eric Schantz, then a senior planner with the town (Mr. Schantz is now a principal planner, working remotely) recommended the board issue a “negative declaration” for the New York State Environmental Quality Review Act, meaning that an intensive environmental review was not conducted.
In the environmental assessment form filled out by the board, it concluded that “no, or small impact may occur” when answering both “Will the proposed action impact existing public or private water supplies?” and “Will the proposed action result in an adverse change to natural resources (e.g. wetlands, water bodies, groundwater, air quality, flora and fauna)?”
Ditto for whether the storage plant might “create a hazard to environmental resources or human health.”
Considering the fire at the East Hampton facility, which resulted in the release of over two million gallons of water from an on-site fire suppression system, it’s hard to imagine that a similar fire at the Montauk plant, especially given its location, wouldn’t have environmental consequences with no good way to remediate them.
“NextEra needs to be aggressive and judicious about cleaning up the PFAS in East Hampton and preventing another incident,” said Adrienne Esposito, the executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment. “We know now you don’t pour water on any type of fire with this battery technology. They should immediately update that system and capture any runoff if such an incident occurred.”
Kay Tyler, the executive director of Concerned Citizens of Montauk, said of the Montauk facility: “It was an environmental concern before and even more so now. It’s something we will need to work together with the town and the company to mitigate, a collaboration. The more people know, the more demands they’ll make for these companies to make changes. We don’t want to wait for the next worst thing to happen.”
NextEra did not respond to a request for comment.
At the time of the review, Job Potter was the chairman of the planning board. While he signed off on the environmental assessment form, he voted against the project, noting its proximity to the two water bodies.
His board was more concerned with flooding, since the facility is “entirely surrounded by areas which are within a designated flood hazard zone,” according to a May 12, 2017, memo from Mr. Schantz. “It may be difficult or impossible to reach the facility in the event of a major storm,” it read.
An emergency action plan submitted by Montauk Energy Storage Center L.L.C. ultimately satisfied a thin majority of the board by promising “remote monitoring by an off-site control room.”
Still, the planning board felt written approval by the fire marshal and the Montauk Fire Department was imperative. It was received.
David Browne, the chief fire marshal for the town, wrote on April 19, 2017, “The chief of the Montauk Fire Department is confident in their ability to respond [to] and address any concerns that may arise. After careful review and consultation with the Montauk Fire Department we have no objections to this project going forward.”
“The board also had concerns over the potential for spills of hazardous substances given the unique design/chemical composition of large lithium-ion batteries,” Mr. Schantz’s memo continued.
“The board requested information on how spills will be contained and stated that a detail of the containment areas should be provided in the plans,” he wrote. “The applicants have provided notations to the plans as well as a detailed plan of the design of the spill-containing platforms upon which the inverters and transformers (which contain liquids that could spill) are to be placed. The narrative states that the batteries themselves do not contain liquids and therefore do not present the potential for spill of hazardous substances.”
Perhaps the batteries don’t contain liquid themselves, but mixed with two million gallons of water, they’ve proven problematic.
“Think about an environmental disaster, you have the pond and the bay,” mused Gerry Turza, the fire and emergency medical services administrator for East Hampton Village, last week. Mr. Turza recalled the review process for both battery storage facilities and said fire risk, and the risk of water contamination caused by the suppression systems weren’t a focus.
“It was kind of dismissed. That wasn’t their main concern. Here we are three years after a fire and now it’s the main concern,” he said.
The town did, however, require the facility to be screened with a row of four foot “green giant” arborvitae.
At last Thursday’s town board meeting, Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez offered a lengthy statement about the forever chemical contamination at the Cove Hollow facility.
“Suffolk County Water Authority’s wells were recently shut down because of a contaminant called PFPrA,” she read.
“PFPrA is an unregulated contaminant that is not on the state’s standard testing list. It is not among the 40 PFAS chemicals the Department of Environmental Conservation screens for. The Suffolk County Water Authority only identified it using its own specialized, in-house laboratory method. What that means is that standard testing by the state, or by anyone following the accepted protocol, could not have detected it. It is impossible to act on a contaminant that the established science of the time could not yet identify.”
She also offered a new theory about the source of the contamination saying it had not yet been determined that the battery facility was to blame.
The D.E.C., she said, was also investigating whether it could have come from a 2005 plane crash at Mill Hill Lane and Meadow Way, extinguished using aqueous film-forming foam, “the same firefighting foam that led to our airport’s designation as a Superfund site.”
However, according to East Hampton Village Mayor Jerry Larsen, at a meeting with the D.E.C. this week, the state organization said “they had no idea of a second potential site.”
The crash was half a mile southeast of the water authority wells that have been shut down.
The Suffolk County Water Authority lawsuit says groundwater moves in the opposite direction at that location, but the supervisor had a possible explanation: “The site lies roughly half a mile from the affected wells, and the sustained pumping of those wells may have drawn contamination toward them,” she said.
Daniel Dubois, a spokesperson for the water authority, said in a text Tuesday that its wells “do not change the direction of groundwater flow.”
