Wainscott Sand Mine Lawsuit Dismissed On Technicality

A state judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by the owners of the former sand mine in Wainscott against East Hampton Town, East Hampton Village and two local fire departments over contamination of the water beneath the mine by chemicals in firefighting foam.

The judge, Acting Supreme Court Justice Joseph Farneti, dismissed the lawsuit brought by the sand mine’s owner, John Tintle, on a technicality: saying the counter-claim against the municipalities and the fire departments was not filed soon enough after the property owner should have been aware of the contamination.

David Eagan, the attorney for the Wainscott Commercial Center, as the property is now known, said that he has already filed an appeal of Judge Farneti’s ruling and that his client’s claims against the town will be “vigorously pursued” since the town has refused to withdraw its own lawsuit against Mr. Tintle, despite findings that seem to show the sand mine property has not contributed to contamination of groundwater.

“The Town’s claims against the WCC are baseless as confirmed by the [state Department of Environmental Conservation’s] recent decision to declassify the WCC site based upon its extensive groundwater and soil testing of the site,” Mr. Eagan said in an email on Wednesday. “In doing so, the NYSDEC concluded that: the PFAS groundwater contamination at the WCC ‘is coming from an off site source,’ that low-level PFAS detections in on-site soil do not implicate the site as a contributing source of PFAS groundwater contamination, and that environmental sampling has determined that past site practices have not contaminated the site.”

Mr. Eagan noted that two other federal claims his clients filed against the town related to the issue — including one that accuses the town of having dragged the Wainscott Commercial Center into the legal melee over the contamination because of the application for a 50-lot light industrial development pending before the town Planning Board — are still pending in federal courts.

The town has sued the four paper corporations under which Mr. Tintle holds the 70 acre former mine, claiming that the property may have been a contributing source of PFAS chemicals because of a fire training exercise that was held by the Bridgehampton Fire Department and East Hampton Fire Department there. After the state DEC released the results of its own investigation, the town declined to withdraw its suit, saying that there was still evidence that the site may have contributed to contamination for which the town is largely being blamed.

Firefighting foams that were stored at the town-owned East Hampton Airport and used in drills and emergency responses to plane accidents have been blamed for the contamination of groundwater flowing beneath southern Wainscott.

The town is target of a class-action suit by a Wainscott resident over the contamination of groundwater in the hamlet, and has in-turn sued fire departments and East Hampton Village, as well as the various chemical manufacturers that produced the PFAS chemicals and the firefighting foams in which they were common ingredients.

All of the cases have been lumped together in federal court case that is being adjudicated in a South Carolina district court — a point that Mr. Eagan has pulled his client into an incredibly costly legal fight that he deserves to be released from.