What Changed Since the Last Time We Wrote About This

When we last covered Veterans Park, the story was about permission. The Grand Island Town Board had a decision in front of it, residents showed up to weigh in, and the question was whether the town would open its own land to outside crews carrying radiation detectors.

That question got answered. The board voted unanimously on Monday, August 3, to allow the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency onto town-owned and town-controlled property.

Here's what a lot of people on this island still don't realize. The testing isn't a plan anymore. It's happening. Crews have been conducting ground-level work on Grand Island, at town property and at select private addresses, and they've been at it for weeks.

What hasn't arrived is a single official result.

The Eleven Points at Veterans Park

If you've driven Bedell Road, you know the park. The veterans monument sits at the entrance. Behind it are the fields where island kids play soccer, baseball and softball, and where a whole lot of parents have spent their Saturday mornings in folding chairs.

That park came up in an aerial survey. A low-flying plane loaded with sensors passed over Western New York and picked up eleven points at Veterans Park, scattered across an area roughly 500 to 600 feet in diameter.

DEC engineering geologist Patrick Concannon walked the Town Board through it, and he was careful with his words in a way that's worth repeating. The survey result doesn't indicate a problem. It doesn't resemble the situations being dealt with elsewhere in the region. In his phrasing, it's simply a location of interest.

That distinction matters enormously, and it's the thing most likely to get lost when this gets shared around. An aerial hit is a reason to go take a closer look. It is not a finding.

Why People Are Uneasy Anyway

And yet.

Parents raised the obvious point at that Town Board meeting. Their kids play ball at Veterans Park. They've played there for years. Nobody in that room treated it as an unreasonable thing to bring up, because it isn't.

Jim Daigler, a Grand Island resident who works as an environmental engineer, spoke up too. He said the news didn't surprise him, and then he said the part that's actually true. Nobody knows how intense this is yet. That's not alarmism. That's an engineer refusing to guess.

Town Supervisor Peter Marston pushed back with his own reasoning, and it's fair reasoning. Grand Island was never an industrial community. No smokestacks. No chemical plants. He said he doesn't expect testing to turn anything up here, and given the island's history, that's a defensible position.

Both things can sit in the same room. The odds are good that nothing is here. People are still going to want to see the paperwork.

Marston also told the board something that got less attention than it deserved. Somewhere between 15 and 20 privately owned Grand Island properties are on the list for testing.

He wasn't told which ones. Three of them had already been walked at that point, and in his description, they came back clear.

So there are neighbors on this island who've had crews in their yard, and there are neighbors who have no idea whether their address is on a list somewhere. That uncertainty is its own kind of weight, and it's part of why the drop-in sessions have mattered.

You Can Ask for Your Own Property to Be Tested

This is the piece that keeps surprising people, so here it is plainly.

You don't have to be flagged to get screened. Any resident can request it.

Mary Skibinski, a Grand Island resident, did exactly that at one of the recent sessions. Nothing had shown up at her address in the aerial data. She signed up anyway. Her reasoning was straightforward. Veterans Park sat outside the circle she'd been shown, which made her wonder how tidy those circles really are, and she figured getting tested might help build the picture for everybody else even if her own soil came back fine.

That's a pretty good summary of how this island tends to handle things.

Where the Broader Story Comes From

All of this falls under something called the Niagara and Erie County Radiological Assessment, a joint effort by the DEC and EPA working with the state Department of Health.

It traces back to World War II. Western New York was a hub for manufacturing atomic weapon components during the Manhattan Project, and other industries in the region handled radiological material as well. Some of that material moved around afterward in ways that were never well documented.

You don't have to look far from the Grand Island Bridge to find an example. The Seaway Industrial Park along River Road in Tonawanda is a former industrial landfill that took in radioactive material in 1974, moved there from the adjacent Ashland 1 site. The Army Corps of Engineers awarded a contract worth $17.6 million to seal it, including a 22-acre engineered cap five feet thick.

The current assessment started in the air. The first phase flew in late 2023 and summer 2024, using a single-engine plane fitted with a sensor package. A vehicle-based survey followed, rolling through Erie and Niagara counties.

What it found in Niagara County is why everyone is paying attention. Elevated radiation has turned up in the yards of more than 120 homes. Four families in the Town of Niagara have been temporarily relocated so additional testing and risk assessment could be done. Governor Kathy Hochul has called on the EPA to accelerate testing and get resources to affected families faster.

At a community session in July, a Town of Niagara property owner named Trevor Bradley described what that actually feels like from inside it. His property carried some of the highest readings found, and his three-year-old daughter had been playing in that yard since she could crawl. Sprinklers in the summer. Leaf piles in the fall. Snow in the winter. He left that meeting saying he still didn't have answers.

That's the context Grand Island is sitting in. Not because the same thing is happening here, but because it happened close enough that people can picture it.

What the Numbers Actually Show So Far

It's worth balancing that against the wider data, because the wider data is genuinely reassuring.

More than 1,230 properties had been visited across both counties as of early August, with 756 access forms returned. On a single Saturday of fieldwork, crews screened more than 30 properties. In their joint statements, the DEC and EPA have consistently reported the same preliminary finding. The vast majority of properties screened require no further action.

The agencies have also expanded the assessment into several Southtowns communities in Erie County, which tells you the work is widening rather than narrowing.

So the honest picture is this. A small number of properties in a specific area of Niagara County have real problems. The overwhelming majority of everything else screened so far has come back fine. Grand Island has produced no findings at all to date.

Where to Get Answers, and What to Expect

The Grand Island drop-in session was held Monday, August 17, from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. at the Western New York Welcome Center on Alvin Road, just off Exit 19. If you missed it, you weren't the only one. A second session followed on Thursday, August 20, at the Niagara Falls Convention Center.

One is left, and it's open to anyone regardless of where they live. Monday, August 24, from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. at the Lewiston Library, 305 South 8th Street. If you're reading this the weekend it went up, that's tomorrow.

These are drop-ins, not meetings. There's no registration and no presentation to sit through. You walk in, find a person, and ask your question. You can also sign your property up for screening while you're there.

If you can't make one, there's a dedicated phone line at (518) 712-8279, staffed daily from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. You can email [email protected], and you can get updates sent straight from the DEC by signing up at on.ny.gov/NECRAupdates.

What Happens Next

Marston has said the town will pass along results as soon as it has them, and his commitment was simple enough to hold him to. Share everything, as fast as possible. Residents will be notified once official findings come back.

Until then, the status is genuinely this. Testing is underway. Nothing has been found on Grand Island. Results are coming.

Anyone telling you more than that right now is filling in blanks, and this is not a story that benefits from filled-in blanks.

What we can say is that when the island was asked to open its own land first, before anybody knew what might turn up, the answer was yes and it was unanimous. That's not nothing. We'll be here when the results come in, and we'll tell you exactly what they say.