The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) drew criticism from a Suffolk County health inspector at a public meeting last Thursday, when the agency unveiled a plan to begin investigating how to clean up a polluted East Farmingdale industrial site.

According to the DEC, the operator of the site since 1970, Astro Electroplating, Inc., had illegally dumped wastewater into one permitted and four illegal leaching pools until stopped by the Suffolk County Department of Health Services (SCDHS) in 1986. The county health department immediately ordered the removal of liquid, sludge and soils from the four illegal leaching pools, and from that point on, all wastewater was legally discharged into the county sanitary sewer system. Since that time, the SCDHS continued to enforce health codes at the plant, which is located at 170 Central Avenue and specializes in the plating of nickel, chromium, and copper to plastic components. (The facility, according to the DEC, generates about 10,000 gallons of wastewater per day.)

Meanwhile, also during the late 1980s, the property was declared a Class 2 inactive hazardous waste disposal site under the state Superfund program. (According to the DEC, a Class 2 listing indicates that a significant - although not imminent - threat to public health or the environment exists and action is required.) Through the Superfund program, the state negotiates funding of cleanup with the party or parties thought to be responsible for the pollution. The state's aim is to negotiate a cleanup funded by the polluter or polluters, referred to by the DEC as Potentially Responsible Parties (PRPs). However, the negotiations are often long and arduous. When the PRP(s) are bankrupt or nowhere to be found, the DEC dips into money allocated to the state Superfund program for testing and cleanup.

In this case, the sole PRP, Astro Electroplating, in November of 1997 signed an agreement which stated it would fund cleanup. The DEC and the PRP a few weeks ago reached an agreement on the work plan for a preliminary investigation of the site, which would help the agency evaluate the extent of cleanup needed at the site.

This work plan, the focus of last Thursday's meeting, consists of the following: installation of two new monitoring wells, sampling of these wells, and the five existing wells; collection of 145 soil samples and 26 water samples from 22 points below the ground; collection of 10 soil samples from two pits at the north end of the plating area; collection of three soil and three liquid samples from three points at the south end of the plating area; and analysis of the samples for volatile chemicals and heavy metals.

During the meeting, which took place at the Half Hollow Hills Community Library in Melville, Sy Robbins, a Suffolk County health inspector who has overseen the site for the past five years, criticized the plan. He noted that it concentrated testing heavily on a well-known pollution source point - the former area of the leaching pools - while failing to address other potential pollution source points, such as storm drains in parking lots, roof drains, and possible other underground leaching systems. In a telephone interview after the meeting, Robbins noted that sites such as these must be thoroughly investigated. "It often requires steps that I did not see in the work plan," he said.

Both Robbins and Joseph Crua, a New York State Department of Health Official who was present at the meeting, said there has been no detection of the contamination in the public water supply, which is drawn from several hundred feet below the contamination.

DEC officials have said they will begin implementing the work plan in August. "We will not know the magnitude of the contamination until we start the investigation next month," Dr. Chittibabu Vasudevan, a DEC bureau chief said in a telephone interview after the meeting.