Remediation of contaminated surface soils -- How clean would you like it?
- Salt River Project, Phoenix, AZ (United States)
One source of risk to public health, or the environment, commonly occurs where contamination is found in near-surface soils. Total cost of a near-surface soils remediation project is very sensitive to contaminated soil volume. The most cost-efficient remediation method should optimize the number of soil samples required to delineate the extent of contaminated soils consistent with the risk presented to health and the environment. The required number of samples is determined by the toxicity of the contaminant(s), their routes of entry, duration of exposures to potential target organisms, spatial relationship among the sample points, and level of confidence required about whether undetected contamination might remain on the property after the clean-up effort. A spreadsheet protocol was developed to calculate the number of samples required to determine with a specified level of confidence that a contaminated property had been cleaned up. A remediation procedure was developed that used the number of samples prescribed by the spreadsheet protocol. A Monte Carlo simulation was then used to generate a large number of hypothetically contaminated sites. Using the number of samples dictated by the spreadsheet, the relative detection abilities of random and stratified sample designs were compared. It was found that regardless of property size, significant sampling efficiencies were gained to the degree a site investigator could use historical knowledge to partition (stratify) the site into areas of relatively higher and lower contamination risk, and then collect almost all the samples from the high risk areas. A number of sensitivities related to the sampling/remediation protocol were also tested. It was concluded that site specific clean up confidence can be predetermined and in general, stratified sample designs accomplish this more efficiently than randomized.
- OSTI ID:
- 682213
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-980632--
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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