Insights & Events

On February 25, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York granted Northrop Grumman’s motion for summary judgment in Town of Hempstead v. United States, et al. The court agreed with Northrop Grumman that it was entitled to summary judgment on all of the plaintiff’s claims.

The case was brought in 2016 by a water provider alleging that certain hazardous substances from Northrop Grumman’s legacy manufacturing operations in Bethpage, NY—a facility where Northrop Grumman built U.S. Navy aircraft vital to the United States’ war efforts dating back to World War II along with the Apollo lunar module—had infiltrated the plaintiff’s water supply wells. The plaintiff sought recovery of its response costs under the federal Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) along with compensatory and punitive damages under state common law theories. Through fact and expert discovery, Hollingsworth LLP attorneys developed a record indicating that the hazardous substances in the plaintiff’s supply wells did not originate from Northrop Grumman’s former facility, the plaintiff had failed to prove that its response costs were either necessary or incurred consistent with the National Contingency Plan, and the opinions of the plaintiff’s experts were methodologically flawed and unsupported. Northrop Grumman successfully argued for discovery to be split into two phases, with the CERCLA claims being litigated first followed by the common law claims. Because first phase discovery demonstrated the plaintiff’s inability to prove that the Northrop Grumman site was the source of hazardous substances in the supply wells, Northrop Grumman argued that, as a result, the plaintiff could not succeed on any of its common law claims either. The Court agreed with Northrop Grumman’s arguments and dismissed the common law claims as well.