REMEDIAL ACTION AT HAZARDOUS WASTE SITES
Edward F. Gilardi, Vice President
Roy F. Weston, Inc.
West Chester, Pennsylvania 19380
Michael D. LaGrega, Associate Professor
John Campbell-Loughead, Graduate Student
Department of Civil Engineering
Bucknell University
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania 17837
INTRODUCTION
A tremendous amount of attention is being focused on the clean-up of land areas contaminated by
materials that often threaten acute and chronic toxicity to man. In the U.S. in the past five decades,
governmental and industrial efforts have concentrated on surface water pollution, air pollution and
solid wastes. In the eighties, "land pollution" has come into its own with a vengeance.
Because the contamination of land areas did not provide very much immediate visible evidence,
the problem was allowed to continue and grow over a comparatively long time, in some cases over
30-50 years. Now, as the nature and scope of the problem becomes clearer, it is natural for the public
to call for fast, decisive and complete action to correct the problem.
This public pressure may in part be a response to the improvement in water and air quality which
followed the strong regulatory pressures of surface water standards, effluent guidelines, ambient air
standards and emission controls.
The major differences is that with air and water pollution, a reduction in contaminant discharge is
often quickly reflected in an improvement in water or air quality. Contaminated land, however is very
unforgiving; once contaminated it is cleared by natural processes at an extremely slow rate. Thus
merely stopping the discharge of hazardous materials to a site does very little in the reduction of the
sites hazardous potential, whether from evaporative air emissions or contaminated surface and
groundwater.
Complicating the situation further is the fact that though the wastes are almost entirely of industrial origin, few of the hazardous waste sites are on the grounds of viable industrial concerns. Indeed
those that are, in most cases are being cleaned up by the industries themselves.
The clean-up of "abandoned" sites requires a heavy infusion of federal and state money; the
federal money from "Superfund" [1], and the state money from various sources. Since the problems
are often highly complex and since public money is so heavily involved, actions taken to remedy
contaminated sites must go through a fairly rigorous chain of events to assure responsible expenditure
of funds. These costs are extremely high. Consider the $30,000,000 that will be spent at Times Beach,
Missouri, not to build anything, but just to reimburse property owners for their losses.
Remedial actions for hazardous wastes sites generally follow a pattern which include:
Problem Recognition
Emergency Action (if required)
Problem Definition
Emergency Action (if required)
Feasibility Studies/Concept Design
Engineering Design
Field Operations
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