Re: CONTAMINANT MASS

[Aimee Houghton <aimeeh@igc.org>]

From: Aimee Houghton <aimeeh@igc.org>

To clarify, Lenny Siegel was the author/presenter of the CONTAMINANT 
MASS posting.

Aimee Houghton

Date: Tue, 9 Apr 1996 08:49:39 -0700 (PDT)
From: Peter Wood <petwoo@thecity.sfsu.edu>
To: Aimee Houghton <aimeeh@igc.org>
cc: "Recipients of list cpro.military" <careerpro@igc.org>
Subject: Re: CONTAMINANT MASS

As the principal author of the referenced report, I feel it necessary to 
make an editorial comment on Aimee's presentation of its contents. While 
mass is presented in terms of relative percentages by type, site data is 
presented as the number of sites (not percentage of sites) where it is 
found. For the Closing Bay area Naval installations, we inventoried soil 
contamination at 135 sites and inorganic soil contamination at 85 sites. 
At closing Bay area Army installations, we inventoried soil contamination 
at 65 sites and inorganic contamination at 40 sites. At Mather AFB, we 
inventoried soil contamination at 26 sites and total petroleum 
hydrocarbon contamination at 11 sites. Finally, at Sacramento Army 
Depot, we inventoried soil contamination at 10 sites and inorganic 
contamination at 4 sites.

So, if you replace all references to percentage of sites with number of 
sites, Aimee's presentation is completely accurate.

I have given Lenny a copy of the entire report including graphs for 
those of you who are interested. In a nutshell, mass gives us (you, 
me and everybody else) a common denominator by which we can begin to 
interpret the vast amounts of environmental data that has been 
collected over the past 15+ years. The data suggest that total 
petroleum contamination together with inorganic contamination (mainly 
antimony, copper, lead and zinc) represent approx. 90% of the total 
contaminant mass found in the soil at Bay area Naval installations. 
However, it is important to note that other soil contaminants may pose 
a much greater risk to human health and the environment than those 
presented above. So, mass alone does not tell the whole story. I 
believe that risk assessments that incorporate mass data will enable 
us to accurately prioritize cleanup actions and better reveal where 
we should be spending limited cleanup technology research and 
development dollars. Mass can also be used to show incremental 
cleanup progress and maybe help demonstrate to Congress the 
progress we've made since 1980. 

On Mon, 8 Apr 1996, Aimee Houghton wrote:

> From: Aimee Houghton <aimeeh@igc.org>
> 
> CONTAMINANT MASS
> 
> The State of California (Department of Toxic Substance Control, 
> Office of Military Facilities) has published a paper describing the 
> preliminary results of its innovative Contaminant Inventory Project. 
> Instead of relying upon the poorly defined "number of sites" with 
> particular forms of contamination, Peter Wood and David Wang used 
> existing data to estimate the contaminant mass, by type, of soil 
> contamination at 13 closing military bases in northern California.
> 
> At eight Navy installations in the San Francisco Bay Area, they found 
> that TPH contamination (total petroleum hydrocarbons) accounted for 54%
> of the total mass of contamination, much more than their 22% share of 
> contaminated sites. Inorganics, principally iron, lead, copper, zinc, 
> and antimony, accounted for 29% of the contaminant mass, even 
> though they represented 68% of the sites. Iron made up 22% of the 
> inorganic contaminant mass (that is, 22% of 29%), even though found 
> at only one site, while arsenic represented only .57% of the mass, 
> even though it was listed at 13% of the inorganic contamination sites.
> 
> Three Bay Area Army sites, including Fort Ord, showed inorganics at 
> 51% (led by lead at 46% of the 51%) of contaminant mass and TPH at 
> 21%. Explosives were counted at .0002%, but that obviously doesn't 
> include the UXO and other explosive wastes at the Fort Ord impact 
> range. A fourth Army base - the Sacramento Army (Signal) Depot - 
> showed inorganics at 68% and solvents at 25% of contaminant mass. 
> Lead represented 97% of the inorganics.
> 
> Mather Air Force Base, the only Air Force facility analyzed, showed 
> TPH at 90% of the contaminant mass. Gasoline accounted for nearly 
> 6% more.
> 
> The data compiled by this project, as well as further analysis of other 
> facilities, provide a tool to "prioritize resource allocation, evaluate 
> cleanup progress, and help focus cleanup technology research and 
> development efforts that maximize risk reduction."
> 
> This methodology appears to be a relatively inexpensive new tool for 
> analyzing cleanup requirements and accomplishments, but as the 
> report acknowledges, the authors have not yet come up with a 
> systematic way to integrate risk and risk reduction data.
> 
>