By Matthew McGevna
The results of a months-long investigation by the DEC revealed that a leak at the OK Petroleum station on Hempstead Avenue was at least partially responsible for the largest-ever MTBE public health alert on Long Island. The DEC says it spent nearly $2 million to investigate the contamination, and that it plans to go through all the necessary legal steps to seek reimbursement.
According to civic leaders in West Hempstead, the West Hempstead Water District as well as the DEC accrued expenses for cleanup and maintenance of the leak. Now residents want to know whether the cost of the investigation will be passed down to customers through their monthly water bill.
³Now the big question is, how soon will they be able to identify the other sources of the leak, and what are the financial obligations to the residents?² said Rosalie Norton, president of the West Hempstead Civic Association, adding, ³If you have a cost, your customer has to pay for it, unless you seek reimbursement through litigation.²
According to Bob York, superintendent of the West Hempstead Water District, the district will be seeking to recoup expenses from OK Petroleum. ³We already have a lawyer handling the case, and we are planning to pursue the recovery of what was lost as a result of the leak,² York said, explaining that the cleanup of the site is being handled by the DEC, so the district did not suffer a continuous loss of revenue. It will, however, attempt to be reimbursed for expenditures stemming from the initial contamination.
Norton expressed her dissatisfaction with the DEC and the water district for their failure to notify residents and community leaders of the results of their investigation before speaking to the press. ³It seems as if they feel it¹s not important enough to pass this on to the residents,² Norton said. ³I contacted them through e-mail, and I don¹t know what to expect. I haven¹t received anything as of yet.²
As for OK Petroleum, Norton says that she has patronized the station herself and does not plan to organize any mass boycott. She added, however, that if it is determined that OK Petroleum knowingly looked the other way while it was aware that MTBE was leaking into the water supply, she would no longer fill up her tank there. ³I don¹t believe in boycotts, but I will not patronize any business that doesn¹t care about the community,² Norton said.
John Musacchia, the president of OK Petroleum, a family-owned business in West Babylon, publicly maintains his innocence, claiming that the leak did not originate with his station. An employee at the station said that the DEC had visited the site and found nothing.
³The DEC came here, and they took measurements at all the pumps, and there was no leak,² said Nick, who declined to give his last name. As he spoke, workers were replacing a gas pump, but Nick insisted that it was being updated, and that the work was not a reaction to the DEC¹s findings.
The DEC has said that even if the site is now found to be without leaks, it doesn¹t change the results of its investigation. ³It may very well be accurate that there is not a leak at this time, but that doesn¹t mean that this didn¹t take place as a result of past activities,² said Bill Fonda, the department¹s regional citizen participation specialist.
Fonda acknowledged the possibility that there are other sites that may have contributed to the contamination, but he stood behind the DEC¹s initial results. ³We wouldn¹t have singled [OK Petroleum] out if we didn¹t believe they were responsible for the leak,² he said.
The DEC said it had implemented two interim remedial measures, or IRMs, which means that two systems have been installed as part of the department¹s initial cleanup of the toxic bloom. The first IRM was installed at the water district¹s Birch Street public supply well to treat the water that is pumped and discharged to the sur
