Adaptive management: a paradigm for remediation of public facilities
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
- NON LANL
Public facility restoration planning traditionally focused on response to natural disasters and hazardous materials accidental releases. These plans now need to integrate response to terrorist actions. Therefore, plans must address a wide range of potential vulnerabilities. Similar types of broad remediation planning are needed for restoration of waste and hazardous material handling areas and facilities. There are strong similarities in damage results and remediation activities between unintentional and terrorist actions; however, the uncertainties associated with terrorist actions result in a re-evaluation of approaches to planning. Restoration of public facilities following a release of a hazardous material is inherently far more complex than in confined industrial settings and has many unique technical, economic, social, and political challenges. Therefore, they arguably involve a superset of drivers, concerns and public agencies compared to other restoration efforts. This superset of conditions increases complexity of interactions, reduces our knowledge of the initial conditions, and even condenses the timeline for restoration response. Therefore, evaluations of alternative restoration management approaches developed for responding to terrorist actions provide useful knowledge for large, complex waste management projects. Whereas present planning documents have substantial linearity in their organization, the 'adaptive management' paradigm provides a constructive parallel operations paradigm for restoration of facilities that anticipates and plans for uncertainty, multiple/simUltaneous public agency actions, and stakeholder participation. Adaptive management grew out of the need to manage and restore natural resources in highly complex and changing environments with limited knowledge about causal relationships and responses to restoration actions. Similarities between natural resource management and restoration of a facility and surrounding area(s) after a disruptive event suggest numerous advantages over preset linearly-structured plans by incorporating the flexibility and overlap of processes inherent in effective facility restoration. We discuss three restoration case studies (e.g., the Hart Senate Office Building anthrax restoration, Rocky Flats actinide remediation, and hurricane destruction restoration), that implement aspects of adaptive management but not a formal approach. We propose that more formal adoption of adaptive management principles could be a basis for more flexible standards to improve site-specific remediation plans under conditions of high uncertainty.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC52-06NA25396
- OSTI ID:
- 956547
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-09-00416; LA-UR-09-416; TRN: US201014%%1916
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Waste Management 2009 ; March 1, 2009 ; Phoenix, AZ
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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