At a packed Saturday morning forum inside Poquatuck Hall, the Orient Association convened a series of expert panels to confront the past, present and future of the hamlet’s most essential resource: its groundwater.
Over several hours, scientists detailed contamination from PFAS “forever chemicals” and nitrates, hydrologists warned that sea level rise could shrink Orient’s already thin aquifer by 20 percent and environmental leaders and officials debated whether a future public water pipeline might help, or harm, the fragile balance beneath the peninsula.
Orient Association president Tony Asch said the organization’s Water Project has been years in the making. Backed by more than 80 donors, the group hired CDM Smith, a global engineering firm with experience studying Long Island’s aquifers, to conduct what he called a “detailed study of Orient’s relationship to its waters.”
That study revealed both good news and bad: the hamlet’s aquifer appears stable, but it is thin, fragile and increasingly vulnerable to contamination by PFAS, nitrates and salt water intrusion.
“We went into this process with certain assumptions, and were often surprised, not only by some of the reports findings, but also the nuances behind these findings and the range of possible solutions,” Asch said. (The entire forum can be viewed below.)
Quantity, quality and the bays
The morning’s first segment, led by Daniel Watts from the Orient Association’s water committee, walked residents through the core findings of the multi-year study, released in June. He said the group set out to answer three questions: “Do we have enough groundwater? How clean is it? And how healthy are the bays that surround us?”
On quantity, CDM Smith found that Orient sits atop an unusually thin and shallow upper glacial aquifer, unlike much of Long Island.
“The rest of Long Island has deeper, thicker aquifers, but ours is both thin and near the surface and very fragile,” Watts said. Yet the data showed that local use has remained sustainable: of all the rainwater that soaks into the ground each year, residents and farms draw up less than 15%.
“That’s a pretty good balance, a pretty healthy balance,” he said.
U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) records dating to 1957 confirm that the local water table has remained steady, suggesting Orient has not been over-pumping. “We don’t have much water,” Watts concluded, “but we’ve been using a reasonable amount of it.”
On quality, the study synthesized two decades of private well data.
“There have been issues over time,” Watts said, “but overall the water’s in pretty good shape.”
Roughly 20% of wells showed elevated nitrogen levels, and in recent years, widespread PFAS detections — in firefighting foam, cookware and water-resistant fabrics — prompted the county and state to step in. “Because the aquifer is thin and shallow,” he said, “it’s very vulnerable to contamination. We need to be very, very careful.”
On the health of Orient Harbor, Watts said the findings were unexpectedly positive.
“The quality of Orient Harbor is actually quite high. Nitrogen levels are below the levels that cause concern, and oxygen levels are quite high,” he said. The bay’s strong tidal flushing appears to have spared it the low-oxygen, high-nitrogen troubles plaguing other Southold waterways.
County findings: contamination widespread, but help available
A panel moderated by Orient Association vice president Barbara Friedman focused on PFAS and nitrates, two key contaminants identified as most concerning in the study.
Jason Hime, principal public health engineer for the Suffolk County Department of Health Services, and Andrew Rapiejko, the county’s lead hydrogeologist, were joined by Robert Bellotti and Melissa Sweet of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), who are overseeing the state-supervised remediation at the Orient Fire Department, where significant PFAS contamination was detected.
Hime said ten milligrams per liter of nitrates is the drinking-water standard, but that Suffolk’s sanitary code sets a goal of six milligrams per liter. When wells exceed that softer limit, county officials recommend those areas for public water extensions.
Of the 201 private wells tested in the Orient area, he said, 97 exceeded New York State’s PFAS standard, 20 exceeded nitrates and several showed high chloride, iron and pesticide readings. “Only nine wells had no detection at all.”
The PFAS survey began after state and local sampling of test wells and public buildings, including the Orient Fire Department and post office, showed levels above the state’s maximum contamination level. Since then, Suffolk County, the DEC and the state Health Department have coordinated free well testing and, for homes over the limit, installation of point-of-entry treatment (POET) systems paid for through state grants.
Asked about reports that residents were told not to bathe in contaminated water, Hime said the county and state “have made no such recommendation.” The primary concern, he said, “is ingestion, not skin contact.”
As for filters, he outlined three main technologies: granular activated carbon, which is effective but requires maintenance; anion-exchange resin, now being piloted for dual PFAS-and-nitrate removal; and reverse osmosis, useful for kitchen faucets but waste-heavy and limited in output. Whatever system is being used, he warned, maintenance and testing are key.
Tracking the source
Rapiejko, who has investigated PFAS plumes across Suffolk since 2016, said county testing pointed to the firehouse as a primary source.
“The first well we put in, right behind it, came back at 3,000 parts per trillion,” hundreds of times the state’s safety limit of 10. Mapping the plume’s direction, his team found it moving roughly half a mile toward Orient Harbor. With groundwater traveling about a foot per day, he estimated it had taken “about eight years” for the contamination to reach the harbor.
Two smaller hot spots, in the vicinities of Parkview Lane and North Sea Drive, are also under study. In those areas, Hime said, a handful of wells have tested between 30 and 40 parts per trillion, “orders of magnitude lower” than near the firehouse, but still above state standards.
The cleanup path ahead
Bellotti and Sweet, the DEC officials, outlined the slow but structured Superfund process now underway.
“We’re in the site-characterization phase,” Bellotti said, the first of several steps that include a remedial investigation, feasibility study, record of decision and — finally — cleanup and long-term monitoring. Each stage, he noted, includes public comment periods and document releases.
The Orient Fire Department is leading and funding the investigation under DEC oversight.
“We’ll ensure it is properly protective of health and the environment,” Bellotti said, noting that costs for remediation remain uncertain.
Sweet described potential remedies, including pump-and-treat systems and in-situ carbon barriers that trap PFAS in the aquifer, but said it could years to see any relief.
“It takes a couple years for the actual remedy be selected, and then it can also take quite a serious amount of time in order to implement that relief.”
Hime urged residents to “get your wells tested every year,” offering the county hotline — 631-852-5810 — and noting that tests within the Orient survey zones are free.
“Test, test, test,” he said.
Salt water intrustion
At the second panel, experts warned that saltwater intrusion poses a slow but serious risk to the hamlet’s shallow, fragile aquifer — often less than 25 feet thick along the coast and 50 to 90 feet inland.
With sea levels predicted to rise about 21 inches by 2050 and 47 inches by 2100, the salt–freshwater interface will move upward and inland, shrinking the usable aquifer by roughly 20 percent and putting coastal and near-shore wells at greatest risk
USGS hydrologist Fred Stumm and CDM Smith vice president Mary Ann Taylor described intrusion as both lateral (from the coast) and vertical (up-coning from below during heavy pumping), stressing the need for new monitoring wells, annual testing and conservation during droughts.
‘Unintended consequences’ and the pressure to grow
The third panel centered on a debate about a proposed Suffolk County Water Authority pipeline from Flanders to the edge of Southold Town, and possibly a second one someday from East Marion to Orient.
The debate underscored tensions between residents fighting PFAS and saltwater intrusion near the shoreline who want options now, and residents focused on long-term growth fear that a pipe laid in 2026 writes land-use checks that future boards will be pressured to cash.
Environmental advocate Bob DeLuca of Group for the East End was joined by Southold Town Supervisor Al Krupski, Shelter Island Town Engineer and oyster farmer Joseph Finora and SCWA operations chief Joseph Pokorny — who provided background on the authority’s countywide system and fielded questions on the status of the proposed North Fork interconnection and a potential Orient spur. Watts, the moderator, framed the conversation as an exploration of “the pros and cons of public water.”
DeLuca, who has been advising the Orient Association’s Water Committee, reached back to the last time a pipeline was floated on the eastern end of the Fork and to the dynamic he said has dogged every big infrastructure decision he’s seen in four decades of environmental work.
“In this business, as long as I’ve been at it, the most challenging thing in environmental management is unintended consequences,” he said.
The earlier proposal would have tied East Marion to the Brown’s Hills well field. It sparked what DeLuca called a necessary caution: if a pipe solves a drinking water problem today, what does it catalyze tomorrow? “The concern is … growth inducement,” he said, describing how infrastructure “has a tendency to, if you want to, you can do more with property than you might otherwise do.”
With sea level rise tightening the usable footprint of coastal parcels and land values surging, DeLuca said the real-world effect shows up not in one dramatic rezoning but in a steady stream of applications: small variances, larger footprints, new uses.
“It’s the death of a 1000 cuts,” he said, adding that boards are then pressured, case by case, to make exceptions that become precedents.
He urged a structured, standing dialogue between the town and SCWA —“because that’s the way you get the better long term planning”— and said any move toward public water must be paired with explicit, durable guardrails on growth.
“It’s my hope that communities can find the resources they need, the infrastructure they need, without sabotaging the community character that most people came for.”
Shelter Island’s public water experiment
Finora sketched a story that sounded, at first, like an argument for public water’s practicality — but, ultimately, its dependence on local control.
He traced the evolution of Shelter Island’s West Neck water system from a neighbor’s private well into a town-owned utility that, after decades, struggled to find licensed operators willing to cover the system twice a day, every day.
“It’s a story about community need and adapting to their changing needs,” he said.
With retirement looming for the longtime operator and no replacement available, the town turned to the SCWA, Finora said. The structure now in place leaves the infrastructure in town hands while SCWA operates the system “from soup to nuts,” including compliance testing and billing, under contract.
“Largely, that’s been very successful,” Finora said. “Suffolk Water provided us with financing and expertise that effectively came at no cost to the town,” while the town retained control over core choices like adding customers or changing rates. His point for Orient seemed to be that small systems can benefit from SCWA’s technical depth without ceding the community’s say over who connects and when.
Yet he also underscored what often gets lost in discussions about an island with three community systems.
“About 90% of the [island’s] parcels are served by individual wells.”
Planning, preservation and irrigation
Krupski, who has spent years in town and county government threading conservation policy through growth pressure, backed DeLuca’s framing and walked through Southold’s playbook.
“Southhold looks the way it does today, and it’s not an accident,” he said, crediting long-running planning and land-preservation efforts for the town’s character and its working waterfront. But he warned that introducing public water has immediate regulatory effects. When SCWA first arrived in parts of town decades ago, he said, “the impact of that was immediate, because now you don’t have to worry about the separation between wells and your neighbor septic system,” which allowed small lots to be developed “very easily.”
Krupski said he urged residents to proceed parcel by parcel, backed by data.
On his own road, when mains arrived, he said he told neighbors to get their water tested “so you’re comfortable with what you have … Many got their water tested. Many of them didn’t, and some hooked up and some didn’t, but they made informed decisions. And I think this community is really going to make an informed decision based on the whole scenario.”
He pointed to a new irrigation law the Town Board adopted with local industry support as an “easy step towards water conservation,” and flagged the hydro-geologic difference between a countywide grid and a thin peninsula.
“A public water supply will draw from one spot,” he said, while historically, widespread farm irrigation drew more evenly from the aquifer. The supervisor said that any decision here should account for that concentration of stress.
Water pipeline questions
Pokorny, who spent most of his time explaining SCWA’s sprawling system and the environmental impact statement process for an eight-plus-mile interconnection that would push water east from Flanders into Southold, addressed the Orient question two ways.
First, he said SCWA included Orient in its environmental review because PFAS detections here prompted the county Health Department to designate a “survey area.” The authority has responded to similar contamination clusters elsewhere by racing in mains — funded, he said, largely by federal and state grants rather than individual homeowners.
He also addressed the concern that a pipe to Orient would someday reverse flow and export local groundwater. Given Orient’s thin aquifer and tiny well yields, he said, it’s “super remote” that SCWA would ever pump water out.
If the day comes when Orient is widely served, he said the most likely design would be ground-level storage tanks topped off during off-peak hours by the new interconnection, then boosted during summer peaks.
Pokorny stressed that SCWA is not unilaterally marching mains to Orient Point.
On the Orient spur, he said, “we have no plans.” The authority cannot move without money, and today “we don’t have any of that lined up.” If residents, the town and the Health Department signal support, he said, SCWA can chase grants as it has in Wainscott, Manorville and along South River Road in Riverhead.
But, he said, “we’re not forcing anybody to hook up.”
