High Resolution Site Characterization as key element for proper design and cost estimation of groundwater remediation


Submitted: 21 March 2013
Accepted: 3 March 2016
Published: 30 December 2014
Abstract Views: 922
PDF: 611
Publisher's note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Authors

Substantial amounts of money are spent each year on cleaning up ground water contaminations that were caused by historical industrial site activities. Too often, however, remedial objectives are not achieved within the anticipated time frame. Moreover, remedial budgets which were estimated prior to the start of remediation turn out to be largely insufficient to meet the remedial objectives. This situation, very common, creates significant troubles for all the stakeholders involved in the remediation project. The reason for not meeting remedial regulatory closure criteria or exceeding remedial budgets is often due to an incomplete conceptual site model. Having conducted high resolution site characterization programs at numerous sites where remediation was previously conducted, ERM has found several recurring themes: • Missed source areas and plumes; • Inadequate understanding of source area and plume architectures (i.e., three-dimensional contaminant distribution); • Inadequate understanding of the effects of site (hydro)geologic conditions on the ability to access contamination (i.e., via remedial additive injections of groundwater/soil gas extraction). This paper explains why remediations often fail and what the alternatives to prevent these failures (and exceeding remedial budgets) are. More specifically, it focuses on alternative investigation methods and approaches that help to get to a more complete (high resolution) conceptual site model. This more complete conceptual site model in return helps a more focused remedial design with a higher remedial efficiency. As a minimum, it will take away a lot of (financial) uncertainty during the decision making when selecting a remedial alternative. Contaminants that have a greater density then water are known to have a greater complexity in terms of both investigation as well as remediation. Therefore, they will be the main focus of this paper.

Dijkshoorn, P., Mori, P., & Cappelletti Zaffaroni, M. (2014). High Resolution Site Characterization as key element for proper design and cost estimation of groundwater remediation. Acque Sotterranee - Italian Journal of Groundwater, 3(4). https://doi.org/10.7343/as-092-14-0119

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Citations

Similar Articles

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.