The Use of Future First Planning, Triad, and Performance-Based Contracting to Accelerate Site Closure at Seymour Johnson AFB
Martin Wangensteen, Bay West, Inc.
Environmental restoration sites have been historically avoided at military installations thereby restricting development options at the potential expense of the installation's mission. This session describes the USAF Air Combat Command's (ACC) and USACE-Omaha District's successful integration of the Future First Planning (F2P) concept, the Triad approach, and performance-based contracting to accelerate cleanup and un-encumber mission-critical real estate at Seymour Johnson AFB.
Petroleum odors were noticed at the Radar Tower Site (OT-29) during construction activities in 1989. Subsequent investigations identified halogenated and non-halogenated volatile organic compounds and lighter-than-water, non-aqueous-phase liquid (LNAPL) in soil and ground water. OT-29 interim actions were effective in protecting nearby receptors but only marginally successful in source removal and driving the site to closure. To accelerate the site closure process, ACC/USACE developed an exit strategy involving: 1) the Triad approach to dynamically accelerate site characterization; and, 2) a performance-based remedial action contract to empower the remediation contractor to implement innovative site closure solutions.
In two field characterization efforts, the Triad approach was used to delineate soil and ground water impacts with 55 direct push points and over 670 soil and ground water samples for analyses. This approach saved $60,000 and six months time relative to standard investigation techniques and generated data for use by the performance-based contractor's remediation team to design the streamlined cleanup approach.
The performance-based site closure strategy involves: 1) development of remedial goals that match future land use; 2) aggressive removal of LNAPL using surfactants and mobile multiphase extraction; 3) excavation and on-site treatment/beneficial reuse of contaminated source-area soils; and 4) aggressive treatment of residual ground water impacts via in situ chemical oxidation with subsequent monitored natural attenuation. The use of these techniques is projected to result in life cycle cleanup cost savings of $1.8M and 20 years over the previous remediation strategy.
Use of SADA to Expedite a Collaborative Soil Removal Action
Jim Wulff, Tetra Tech EMI
Spatial Analysis and Decision Assistance (SADA) software played a key role in expediting the contaminated soil removal action at the Barker Chemical Company site in Inglis, Florida. More than 100 residential parcels occupy a site where phosphate ore was processed into fertilizer, creating waste material elevated in lead and arsenic. SADA managed data on contaminant concentrations estimated from discrete and composite samples and analyzed with an X-ray fluorescence detector in the field and measured in samples sent to a laboratory. SADA provided a platform to integrate the four data streams resulting from the sampling effort into a collaborative data set to make remedial decisions. SADA visualizations satisfied the overlapping - yet distinct - remedial goals and criteria of two regulatory agencies (the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection [FDEP]), each having a different soil removal criterion for arsenic. Thus, SADA was an instrumental part of the collaborative process that guided the removal action.
SADA visualizations identified parcels where soil removal was required, based on composite samples that exceeded the EPA's removal criterion of 40 milligram per kilogram (mg/kg). Next, contaminant concentrations were interpolated in SADA's Area of Concern (AOC) module to delineate areas where arsenic and lead concentrations exceeded the FDEP criterion of 8 mg/kg. The AOCs were exported from SADA, converted to ArcView shapefiles and loaded to a handheld device to guide excavation in real time. As a result, contaminated soil was excavated to the FDEP criterion in the parcels selected for removal actions, a selection that was based on the EPA criterion. AOC maps were also created for parcels where the contaminant concentration in soil was estimated to exceed FDEP - but not EPA - criteria, so that FDEP could pursue further remediation under a state program.
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