A Management Systems Review of the Superfund RI/FS: Opportunities for Streamlining

The Management Systems Review is an important component of EPA’s quality assurance program. MSRs enable managers to assess the effectiveness of environmental data operations and the quality assurance/ quality control activities designed to ensure that the results are of the expected quality. These reviews inform managers about aspects of the environmental data operation that are working well and those which may warrant some improvement. A recent review of the Superfund remedial investigation/feasibility study (RI/FS) has shown that the MSR is an excellent tool for providing a systematic definition of complex environmental data operations and for enabling a thorough analysis of these operations. The MSR utilized information gathered from interviews of Regional staff and management and from case studies of recently completed RI/FSs. The findings indicated that environmental data play an important role in most RI/FS decisions and that thorough and structured scoping is critical to the effectiveness of the RI/ FS. Analysis of the RI/FS process using a comprehensive flow model identified several opportunities for changes that may increase efficiency in data collection and the reliability of RI/FS decisions. These changes provide for more effective scoping activities, a streamlined feasibility study, and increased use of treatability studies during the RI. A pilot demonstration of these process changes is being planned for a Regional RI/FS.