Occupational stress: Coping of police and their spouses

One hundred seventy-seven police officers and their spouses from two metropolitan areas completed separate questionnaires regarding stress and coping. Both the police and spouses reported using four coping activities in response to their own stressors: problem focused, emotion focused, religiosity, and rugged individualism. Three potential police strains previously noted in non-empirical literature were given special attention; divorce potential, drinking behavior, and suicide thoughts.     

Low intervention soil remediation approaches

Traditional bioremediation approaches have been used to treat petroleum source contamination in readily accessible soils and sludges. Contamination under existing structures is a greater challenge. Options to deal with this problem have usually been in the extreme (i.e., to dismantle the facility and excavate to an acceptable regulated residual, or to pump and treat for an inordinately long period of time). The excavated material must be further remediated and cleanfill must be added to close the excavation. If site assessments were too conservative or incomplete, new contamination adulterating fill soils may result in additional excavation at some later date. Innovative, cost-efficient technologies must be developed to remove preexisting wastes under structures and to reduce future remediation episodes. An innovative soil bioremediation treatment method was developed and evaluated in petroleum hydrocarbon contaminated (PHC) soils at compressor stations of a natural gas pipeline running through Louisiana. The in-situ protocol was developed for remediating significant acreage subjected to contamination by petroleum-based lubricants and other PHC products resulting from a chronic leakage of lubricating oil used to maintain the pipeline itself. Initial total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH) measurements revealed values of up to 12,000 mg/kg soil dry weight. The aim of the remediation project was to reduce TPH concentration in the contaminated soils to a level of <200 mg/kg soil dry weight, a level negotiated to be acceptable to state and federal regulators. After monitoring the system for 122 days, all sites showed greater than 99-percent reduction in TPH concentration.     

Recreational impacts on Colorado River beaches in Glen Canyon,Arizona

Recreational impact was measured on eight beaches in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and 15 beaches in Grand Canyon National Park using permanently located transects and plots. Recreational impact indices included densities of human trash and charcoal and a measure of sand discoloration due to charcoal. Significant increases in the indices occurred on several Glen Canyon beaches over a seven-month period. Sand discoloration became significantly higher over all Glen Canyon beaches during the same time period. All indices were significantly higher in Glen Canyon than on similar Grand Canyon beaches. These differences are probably due to differences in: (a) level of impacts tolerated by the respective management regimes and, (b) in the number of user days among the two National Park Service administrative units. Management alternatives are presented for reversing the present trends of recreational impact on Glen Canyon beaches.     

COMPARISON OF PROCESS‐BASED AND ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK APPROACHES FOR STREAMFLOW MODELING IN AN AGRICULTURAL WATERSHED1

ABSTRACT: The performance of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and artificial neural network (ANN) models in simulating hydrologic response was assessed in an agricultural watershed in southeastern Pennsylvania. All of the performance evaluation measures including Nash‐Sutcliffe coefficient of efficiency (E) and coefficient of determination (R²) suggest that the ANN monthly predictions were closer to the observed flows than the monthly predictions from the SWAT model. More specifically, monthly streamflow E and R² were 0.54 and 0.57, respectively, for the SWAT model calibration period, and 0.71 and 0.75, respectively, for the ANN model training period. For the validation period, these values were ?0.17 and 0.34 for the SWAT and 0.43 and 0.45 for the ANN model. SWAT model performance was affected by snowmelt events during winter months and by the model's inability to adequately simulate base flows. Even though this and other studies using ANN models suggest that these models provide a viable alternative approach for hydrologic and water quality modeling, ANN models in their current form are not spatially distributed watershed modeling systems. However, considering the promising performance of the simple ANN model, this study suggests that the ANN approach warrants further development to explicitly address the spatial distribution of hydrologic/water quality processes within watersheds.     

Software tools to support incident reporting in safety-critical systems

Incident reporting systems are playing an increasingly important role in the development and maintenance of safety-critical applications. The perceived success of the FAA's Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) and the FDA's MedWatch has led to the establishment of similar national and international schemes. These enable individuals and groups to report their safety concerns in a confidential or anonymous manner. Unfortunately, many of these systems are becoming victims of their own success. The ASRS and MedWatch have both now received over 500,000 submissions. In consequence, the administrators of incident reporting systems increasingly rely upon software tools to support the administration of their systems. In the past, these systems have relied upon ad hoc applications of conventional database technology. However, there are several reasons why this technology is inadequate for many large-scale reporting schemes. In particular, the problems of query formation often result in poor precision and recall. This, in turn, has profound implications for safety-critical applications. Users may fail to identify similar incidents within national or international collections. These ad hoc approaches also neglect the opportunities provided by recent developments in computer assisted interviewing and in the monitoring of retrieval activities to build models of user behavior. These techniques offer a number of potential benefits. For instance, it is possible to automatically detect potential biases in the way that investigators analyze particular incidents.     

Visualizing reductive dechlorination in support of intrinsic bioremediation using multivariate plots and GIS

Demonstrating intrinsic bioremediation requires not only that the right types of evidence be gathered, but also that those data be analyzed at an appropriate level of detail and presented in a manner that clearly illustrates the key trends to the target audience. The goal of this study was to develop one type of multivariate pattern diagram, the pie diagram, for clearly and efficiently presenting data demonstrating the occurrence of reductive dechlorination at sites contaminated by chlorinated ethenes. The pie diagrams were created using normalized ethenes molar concentrations to estimate and illustrate the changes in the concentrations of contaminants and metabolic intermediates that could be attributed to biodegradative processes. Spatial pie‐diagram maps illustrating the normalized chlorinated‐ethenes data were produced using geographic information system (GIS) software. Application of this visualization tool is demonstrated using an example data set and is compared with a conventional x‐y graph of the data. The trends elucidated on the basis of the pie diagrams, coupled with additional site evidence of natural attenuation (e.g., electron donor and acceptor data), are shown to provide a consistent interpretation of the site data. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

STREAM RESTORATION IN THE VICINITY OF BRIDGES1

ABSTRACT: The number of stream restoration and enhancement projects being implemented is rapidly increasing. At road crossings, a transition must be created from the restored channel through the bridge or culvert opening. Given conflicting design objectives for a naturalized channel and a bridge opening, guidance is needed in the design of the transition. In this paper we describe the use of vanes, cross vanes, and w‐weirs, commonly used in stream restoration and enhancement projects, that may provide an adequate transition at bridges. Laboratory experiments were conducted on vanes and cross vanes to provide a transition for single span bridge abutments and on w‐weirs to provide a transition for double span bridges which have a pier in mid‐channel. The results of the experiments provided design criteria for transitions using each of the three structures. Prior field experience provided guidance on appropriate applications in terms of the stream and bridge characteristics.     

MAKING SMARTER ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT DECISIONS1

ABSTRACT: This paper outlines a sound, practical approach for making more informed decisions about environmental policy choices. It emphasizes the importance of using a structured decision process to specify and organize values, use these values to create alternatives, and assess tradeoffs to help achieve a desired balance across key objectives. Although these decision making steps are based on common sense, they are often neglected or poorly carried out as part of the complex evaluations of natural resource options. We discuss several reasons for this frequent neglect of decision making principles and provide examples from recent water use planning projects to demonstrate some of the benefits of using a structured, decision focused approach: new and better solutions, increased and more productive participation by stakeholders, and greater defensibility and acceptance of the resource management evaluation process and its conclusions.