Using risk assessment to achieve cost-effective property transfers and site closures for former UST sites

Risk assessment has been increasingly applied as a tool in making risk management decisions that affect cleanup of contaminated sites, property transactions, and liability issues. As a site-specific evaluation, risk assessment takes into account the unique characteristics and intended future uses for site property in evaluating chemical concentrations which may remain in place without risk to public health and the environment. The results of a risk assessment can be used to determine reuse options for a property, facilitate site closure, and reduce liabilities (Copeland and Robles, 1994; Copeland et al., 1993a). This article describes the risk assessment process, the role of risk assessment in determining the need for remedial action and identifying site-specific cleanup goals, and the cost effectiveness of applying risk assessment in remedial decisions. Because of the prevalence of former UST sites throughout the United States, this article focuses on risk assessment and remediation of UST sites. However, the process can be applied at sites where other chemicals have been released. Three case studies are presented to illustrate the application of risk assessment in achieving cost-effective site closure at sites containing leaking underground storage tanks.     

Ten Year Historical Perspective of the NOAA Damage Assessment and Restoration Program

The United States Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA) was enacted to reduce the probability of oil spills in U.S. waters. A key provision of the legislation enables recovery of damages for restoration of injured natural resources and lost services due to oil spills. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) developed regulations that set out a process for determining the appropriate type and scale of restoration actions to accomplish this goal. The restoration plan developed through this process is the basis for an economic claim for natural resource damages. The regulations recognize that various methods, including environmental models, may be used in identifying and quantifying injuries to natural resources and losses of their services and in developing a restoration approach for these injuries. Rather than designating particular assessment measures, NOAA requires each trustee to decide which methodologies are appropriate for each incident, given its particular facts and circumstances. Any procedure chosen must meet the standards in the rule: it must provide information useful for determining restoration needed for an incident, the cost of the method must be commensurate with the quality and quantity of information it is expected to generate, and, of particular significance here, the method must be reliable and valid for the particular incident. This paper describes how methods are selected, how they might be used, and what legal standards would be applied should these methods be used as evidence in litigation.     

Extricating Membership as a PRP at Hazardous Waste Disposal Sites

Corporations often become potentially responsible parties (PRPs) at hazardous waste sites because of their past transportation or disposal of hazardous substances at such sites. Determining a PRP's potential liability for the assessment and cleanup of hazardous waste sites is a challenging effort and often results in disputes among other PRPs regarding appropriate allocation of response action costs to each party. Further, public companies have an obligation to report probable and reasonably estimable costs under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) for environmental liabilities at their current or prior hazardous waste sites. The first step in such an evaluation is to determine whether or not a PRP can extricate themselves from any association with the subject site or, alternatively, demonstrate de minimis status. This article describes the methods by which PRPs can extricate themselves from liability associated with response action costs at contaminated sites, including: evaluating a PRP's prior settlements or indemnifications with other PRPs; identifying insurance coverage or other financial assurance instruments for the disposal facility; and examining applicable statutes of limitations against when a PRP received notification from the regulatory agency. The article also presents a case study discussing how a PRP with a portfolio of 72 hazardous waste disposal sites was able to extricate itself from the majority of these sites, resulting in only four sites where the PRP was determined to be a PRP and where an associated allocable share was assigned. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Using community relations to reduce costs during remediation projects

Almost everyone who has been involved in a site remediation project has seen schedules slip and costs escalate due to political pressure from the public or the press. While focusing on remediation technologies and containment techniques to control costs, many organizations have neglected a major cost driver—public opinion. This article examines community relations from the perspective of an organization trying to control costs during a site remediation project. It details the strong correlation between the cost of a site cleanup and the level of public dissatisfaction and provides an organization with specific strategies on how to use proven communications techniques to lower costs. Examination of several case studies is provided, including a study involving a site in which community representatives actively worked to reduce project costs. It is clear that any responsible cleanup must be protective of public health and the environment. But it is becoming increasingly apparent that wise allocation of available resources has a profound effect on the program's ability to ensure public and environmental safety. In many cases, it has been proven that some costly cleanups—for example, involving excavation—sometimes actually increase risk by creating an exposure pathway where none existed before. In turn, such cleanups waste resources that are needed elsewhere. The challenge in dealing with this complicated issue is to help stakeholders understand the true ramifications of the choices that are faced at each site. If these stakeholders feel uninformed, powerless, or excluded from the process, it is likely that they will be unable to enter a productive discussion. The community relations programs outlined in documents such as a Superfund guidance can be helpful in familiarizing the community with site-related issues and with gathering public input. These activities act as a baseline for the programs discussed in this article. However, existing programs are not focused on providing a strategic advantage in reaching cleanup solutions and balancing health and environmental considerations with economic considerations.     

Alternatives to incineration in remediation of soil and sediments assessed

Contamination of soil and sediment by pollutants represents a major environmental challenge. Remediation of soil during the original Superfund years consisted primarily of dig and haul, capping, or containment. The 1986 amendments to CERCLA—SARA—provided the incentive for treatment and permanent remedies during site remediation. Thermal treatment, which routinely achieves the low cleanup criteria required by RCRA land-ban regulations, became one of the major technologies used for cleanup under the concept of ARAR. As the remediation industry matured and recognized specific market niches in soil remediation, a number of new technologies emerged. Thermal desorption, bioremediation, soil vapor extraction, soil washing, and soil extraction are being used on sites at which the technology offers advantages over incineration. In addition, a continuing stream of emerging technologies is being presented that requires careful evaluation relative to existing cleanup methods. Each of these technologies offers a range of options for achieving appropriate cleanup criteria, application to different soil matrices, cost, time of remediation, and public acceptability. Balancing cleanup criteria defined by regulation or risk assessment with technology cost and capability affords the opportunity to solve these problems with appropriate balance of cost and protection of human health and the environment.     

Risk assessment: A site-specific approach to establishing acceptable soil cleanup levels

In 1980 the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) was passed to instigate the cleanup of uncontrolled hazardous waste sites. CERCLA necessitated the development of a set of criteria for estimating the severity of the contamination at these sites, the potential impact on human health and the environment, and establishing appropriate cleanup levels for the contaminated media. The risk assessment (RA) format was developed to meet these challenges. Though RAs vary dramatically in their scope, emphasis, and regulatory application, there are two primary objectives common to all RAs: (1) to evaluate potential risks to human health and the environment posed by the release of hazardous substances and (2) to evaluate and establish safe cleanup levels based primarily on the number and type of potential receptors, the toxicity and mobility of the contaminants, and the types of exposure pathways present. Achieving these objectives may be a relatively simple task or an extremely complex and difficult one depending on the type of material released and our understanding of its behavior in the environment, the site conditions, and the governing regulations. This article presents an approach for establishing acceptable cleanup levels for subsurface soils and illustrates the application of this approach to three different regulated sites.     

Emerging trends in informal sector recycling in developing and transition countries

Optimistic estimates suggest that only 30–70% of waste generated in cities of developing countries is collected for disposal. As a result, uncollected waste is often disposed of into open dumps, along the streets or into water bodies. Quite often, this practice induces environmental degradation and public health risks. Notwithstanding, such practices also make waste materials readily available for itinerant waste pickers. These ‘scavengers’ as they are called, therefore perceive waste as a resource, for income generation. Literature suggests that Informal Sector Recycling (ISR) activity can bring other benefits such as, economic growth, litter control and resources conservation. This paper critically reviews trends in ISR activities in selected developing and transition countries. ISR often survives in very hostile social and physical environments largely because of negative Government and public attitude. Rather than being stigmatised, the sector should be recognised as an important element for achievement of sustainable waste management in developing countries. One solution to this problem could be the integration of ISR into the formal waste management system. To achieve ISR integration, this paper highlights six crucial aspects from literature: social acceptance, political will, mobilisation of cooperatives, partnerships with private enterprises, management and technical skills, as well as legal protection measures. It is important to note that not every country will have the wherewithal to achieve social inclusion and so the level of integration must be ‘flexible’. In addition, the structure of the ISR should not be based on a ‘universal’ model but should instead take into account local contexts and conditions.     

A framework for analysis of contamination on human and ecological receptors at DOE hazardous waste site buffer lands

This article discusses a framework and tools for evaluating ecological resources and the effects of cleanup on hazardous waste sites, particularly those with ecological buffer lands. Environmental professionals are faced with assessing the risks of contamination to humans and ecological receptors (organisms and ecosystems) at hazardous waste sites. While exposure assessment has focused largely on human receptors, environmental managers have recently taken a broader view, recognizing the intrinsic value and aesthetic importance of ecological resources and services, and of including a range of stakeholders in remediation decisions. The assessment process involves understanding exposure pathways from source to receptor, and determining how best to interdict these pathways. Environmental characterization and exposure assessment, indicator and biomarker identification, and biomonitoring and surveillance are the major components of ecological assessments. Using the Department of Energy as a case study, this article offers a framework for ecological exposure assessment, recognizing that humans are important components of ecosystems and, like other biota, are exposed to contaminants that move through environmental media. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Tar Balls: The End State

Tar balls are frequently reported as an indicator of the extent of the impact of a spill incident. The determination of the density of tar balls is basic to the shoreline cleanup assessment team (SCAT) process, and is frequently used by the media as an indication of oil pollution. The processes involved in the evolution of tar balls are not well understood and there is a paucity of literature on the science of tar ball formation.     

Obtaining Approvals for Oil and Gas Projects in Shallow Water Marine Areas in Western Australia using an Environmental Risk Assessment Framework

The oil and gas industry is of major economic importance to the state of Western Australia. The majority of its activities are offshore, some occurring in shallow marine areas adjacent to sensitive resources such as coral reefs and mangroves. One of the main issues for the oil and gas industry is continued access to marine acreage. Increasing public concern about the environmental protection of the coastal and marine environment has increased the focus on the various users. This has resulted in the development of statutory and administrative processes, more stringent environmental assessment and operating conditions, and greater scrutiny on the issue of access of proposals to some areas. Detailed environmental assessment and management plans are generated for all drilling and development projects. An environmental risk assessment approach utilising computer modelling, habitat mapping, research and monitoring is used to evaluate the risk of a project on adjacent resources and to obtain government approval. The Wonnich appraisal drilling program, which consisted of two wells drilled from the same surface location situated one kilometre away from an area of high conservation value, will be used as a case study of the risk assessment procedure used by one oil and gas company.     

Proven methods for managing public perception of cleanups

Negative public perceptions can dramatically increase site remediation costs or even bring projects to a grinding halt. Public opposition and ensuing political pressure are two damaging, but often ignored, obstacles that confront remediation managers. This article discusses these and other public management issues, recommending tactics proven for maintaining positive working relationships with a site's human neighbors, the media (electronic and print), government officials, regulatory agencies, and other concerned groups to allow site cleanup to proceed without intervention, opposition, or unnecessary delay. It illustrates its warnings about public and political hostility with case histories from Superfund, RCRA, and other cleanup sites, recounting how corporate management won the public's confidence and kept their projects on time and within budget.     

Team approaches to the development of innovative technologies and processes to facilitate remediation

The enactment of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) created a complex liability scheme for owners, operators and prospective purchasers of contaminated properties, particularly brownfields. As the program developed, liability issues related to contiguous property, prospective purchasers, and no further action determinations became barriers to brownfield property redevelopment. The national effort on the cleanup and redevelopment of brownfield sites took on new emphasis with the passing of the federal “Small Business Liability Protection and Brownfields Revitalization Act” in January 2002. This new law provides liability clarifications as well as funding to facilitate the cleanup of brownfield sites. President Bush stated in his 2003 State of the Union address, “In this century, the greatest environmental progress will come about not through endless lawsuits or command‐and‐control regulations, but through technology and innovation.” The subject of this article is the Interstate Technology Regulatory Commission's Brownfield team, its current initiative, goals, and areas of special focus. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Allocating cleanup costs among potentially responsible parties

Allocating costs for hazardous waste site cleanup among potentially responsible parties is unique to the specific circumstances, history, and data for the site. As such, distinct technical approaches are often needed considering the Gore and Torres factors to develop an overall allocation. These factors include both technical and nontechnical considerations that the trier of fact must weigh to arrive at the overall allocation. This article reviews the legal and technical framework in allocating cleanup costs at hazardous waste sites and presents several case histories illustrating the integration of fact, science and law in the final allocation.     

Characterizing a Brownfields recreational reuse scenario using the Triad Approach–Assunpink Creek Greenways project

Since the early 1990s the U.S. government has been developing and implementing public policies that advance the redevelopment of brownfields, and the recent passage of the Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfields Revitalization Act (SBLRBRA) will significantly advance efforts to integrate environmental contamination mitigation and redevelopment. Experience has demonstrated that successful redevelopment requires the collection, analysis, and interpretation of environmental data in a timely and cost‐effective manner in order to allow developers and lenders to efficiently use cleanup resources, develop response strategies that integrate cleanup with redevelopment, and support meaningful outreach to involved stakeholders. Recent advances in the science and technology of site characterization hold the promise of improved site characterization outcomes while saving time and money. One such advancement, the Triad Approach, combines systematic up‐front planning with the use of a dynamic field investigation process and the generation of real time data to allow in‐field decision making on sample location selection. This article describes an application of the Triad Approach to redevelopment of an urban greenway in Trenton, New Jersey. The Triad Approach, initiated through a partnership between the City of Trenton, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, New Jersey Institute of Technology, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, demonstrated that this approach could accelerate the characterization of the 60‐acre, 11‐parcel project area. Environmental issues that were solved using the Triad Approach included the delineation of the extent of historic fill, determination of no further action for several areas of concern, detailed investigation of specific impacted areas and the acquisition of sufficient data to allow the city to make important decisions regarding remediation costs and property acquisition. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Approaches for assessing hazards and risks to workers and the public from contaminated land

Many public agencies and private entities are faced with assessing the risks to humans from contamination on their lands. The United States Department of Energy (US DOE) and Department of Defense are responsible for large holdings of contaminated land and face a long‐term and costly challenge to assure sustainable protectiveness. With increasing interest in the conversion of brownfields to productive uses, many former industrial properties must also be assessed to determine compatible future land uses. In the United States, many cleanup plans or actions are based on the Comprehensive Environmental Responsibility, Compensation, and Liability Act, which provides important but incomplete coverage of these issues, although many applications have tried to involve stakeholders at multiple steps. Where there is the potential for exposure to workers, the public, and the environment from either cleanup or leaving residual contamination in place, there is a need for a more comprehensive approach to evaluate and balance the present and future risk(s) from existing contamination, from remediation actions, as well as from postremediation residual contamination. This article focuses on the US DOE, the agency with the largest hazardous waste remediation task in the world. Presented is a framework extending from preliminary assessment, risk assessment and balancing, epidemiology, monitoring, communication, and stakeholder involvement useful for assessing risk to workers and site neighbors. Provided are examples of those who eat fish, meat, or fruit from contaminated habitats. The US DOE's contaminated sites are unique in a number of ways: (1) huge physical footprint size, (2) types of waste (mixed radiation/chemical), and (3) quantities of waste. Proposed future land uses provide goals for remediation, but since some contamination is of a type or magnitude that cannot be cleaned up with existing technology, this in turn constrains future land use options, requiring an iterative approach. The risk approaches must fit a range of future land uses and end‐states from leave‐in‐place to complete cleanup. This will include not only traditional risk methodologies, but also the assessment and surveillance necessary for stewards for long‐term monitoring of risk from historic and future exposure to maintain sustainable protectiveness. Because of the distinctiveness of DOE sites, application of the methodologies developed here to other waste site situations requires site‐specific evaluation © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Multi-regime transport model for leaching behavior of heterogeneous porous materials

Utilization of secondary materials in civil engineering applications (e.g. as substitutes for natural aggregates or binder constituents) requires assessment of the physical and environment properties of the product. Environmental assessment often necessitates evaluation of the potential for constituent release through leaching. Currently most leaching models used to estimate long-term field performance assume that the species of concern is uniformly dispersed in a homogeneous porous material. However, waste materials are often comprised of distinct components such as coarse or fine aggregates in a cement concrete or waste encapsulated in a stabilized matrix. The specific objectives of the research presented here were to (1) develop a one-dimensional, multi-regime transport model (i.e. MRT model) to describe the release of species from heterogeneous porous materials and, (2) evaluate simple limit cases using the model for species when release is not dependent on pH. Two different idealized model systems were considered: (1) a porous material contaminated with the species of interest and containing inert aggregates and, (2) a porous material containing the contaminant of interest only in the aggregates. The effect of three factors on constituent release were examined: (1) volume fraction of material occupied by the aggregates compared to a homogeneous porous material, (2) aggregate size and, (3) differences in mass transfer rates between the binder and the aggregates. Simulation results confirmed that assuming homogeneous materials to evaluate the release of contaminants from porous waste materials may result in erroneous long-term field performance assessment.     

Pollutant source identification and allocation: Advances in hydrocarbon fingerprinting

Often liability for environmental damage and cleanup of contaminated sites is made difficult, especially with chemically complex environments containing different pollutants, by the inability to differentiate potential sources (or “owners”) of pollutants from each other. As a result, unnecessary costs may be associated with having to assume financial responsibility for alleged contamination of a site. This article reviews the advances in chemical fingerprinting as a tool in identifying and differentiating sources of hydrocarbon pollutants in chemically complex environments. Appropriate hydrocarbon target analytes and required analytical methods for hydrocarbon fingerprinting are discussed, and new interpretative tools are presented that may be applied to contaminated soil, sediment, and groundwater environmental situations. With these analytical and interpretative techniques, an appropriate allocation of chemical contamination and costs at a site can be made.     

Risk Assessment in Remediation: Accurately Accounting for Uncertainty

Cleanup levels at hazardous waste sites are typically developed based at least in pan on either generic or site-specific risk assessments. Risk assessment in its purest form should be a measure of the potential for a site to cause adverse effects and therefore should be used as the basis for cleanup. However, the process of risk assessment continues to be subject to problems, primarily related to inherent uncertainties in the exposure parameters and toxicity criteria that are the building blocks of the risk assessment. Criticism of risk assessments and risk-based decisions range from comments that the process inadequately protects human health to comments that the process is overly protective, and examples of both ends of the spectrum are readily available. Site remediation professionals should be aware of the issues related to uncertainty and understand the potential problems in order to ensure appropriate and effective site cleanup. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.