Forwarded from Naryanan Krishna, (narayakg@musc.edu)
September 18,1997
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Tony:
Appreciate your response. In the Community Based Environmental Project
(CBEP), as the name sounds, the local community of concern is involved
to identify the environmental hazards in their neighborhoods, and in the
decision making process for environmental cleanup programs. This
project is entirely different from EPA's Superfund cleanup program of
hazardous waste sites. This is an innovative research initiative by the
EPA wherein the state/federal agencies, council of governments, local
bodies, research institutions, environmental activists, stockholders,
representatives of neighborhood associations are partners, who will be
involved in decision making process for environmental cleanup programs.
Being the local and reputed institution, MUSC has the key role of
scientific advocacy for this initiatives and presenting information to
the citizens through our community outreach activities, which will
affirm a sound science based decision making process for better
environmental cleanups. MUSC's assistance to the project are:
collection of existing and historical data in order to identify the
environmental health hazards in the targeted geographic area, identify
the data gaps, conduct human exposure pathway analysis, Geographic
Information System (GIS) based exposure modeling, and community
outreach. MUSC will be the repository for the data pertinent to this
program which will be accessible to public and future researchers. The
activities will also be published on the World Wide Web from time to
time.
EPA has convened couple of open house meetings in Charleston to present
their project concepts, which had overwhelming responses from the
citizens.
Currently we are collecting the existing data pertinent to Charleston
area, from South Carolina Department of Environmental Control, EPA, SC
Department of Natural Resources, NOAA, USGS, US Wildlife & Fisheries,
Chamber of Commerce, environmental groups, local institutions etc., and
establishing a relational database at the MUSC CBEP Office. We will
start analyzing the data to identify the data gaps shortly.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Naryanan Krishna, Ph.D.
Faculty
Department of Biometry & Epidemiology
Medical University of SC
Charleston, SC 29425
Tel: (803) 792-2657
fax: (803) 792-0539
e-mail: narayakg@musc.edu