The National Ground Water Association, founded in 1948, is a not-for-profit professional society and trade association for the ground water industry. Our more than 16,000 members from all 50 states include some of the country's leading public and private sector ground water scientists, engineers, water well contractors, manufacturers and suppliers of ground water related products and services. NGWA has been and continues to be a forum for discussing and promoting the responsible protection, utilization and cleanup of the nation's ground water.
Background
Sience's understanding of the issues related to the identification, assessment and management of contaminated sites has grown exponentially since the passage of Superfund in 1980. During the ensuing two decades, scientists have continued to develop tools and techniques that enable them to manage these sites and reduce impacts on public health and the environment. Federal government funding of scientific research has helped develop an entirely new understanding of impact and remediation. Scientists involved in Superfund and Brownfields sites are faced with the reality, however, that there are no current or emerging technologies able to achieve complete clean up at all contaminated sites within the reasonably foreseeable future at existing funding levels (Freeze, 284). Facing the impracticality of restoring contaminated ground water at all Superfund sites, the current goal of EPA, is a particular challenge. Ground water scientists and engineers recognize that these challenges require a different approach for addressing past and ongoing improper waste disposal practices, founded on a redirection of policy to recognize the state of the science. It is our position that what is needed is national guidance that allows for site-specific decisions based on scientific professionals' judgments (see addendum) and realistic risk assessment. Allowing site-by-site flexibility in determining technically sound and cost-effective cleanup options, along with consideration of exposure scenarios based on planned site use, will ensure a more efficient and productive means of managing, addressing, and monitoring potential impacts on the environment and public health.
Recommendations
Specifically, NGWA recommends that:
- Superfund and brownfields redevelopment program goals should be to identify and control risks to human health and the environment.
Currently, EPA requires remediation goals in their programs to achieve drinking water standards, which is often an impossible goal with today's techniques. Even in the most aggressive and costly cases, experience has confirmed that achieving drinking water standards in the aquifer through active remediation is elusive and generally temporary when apparently achieved. The extent to which ground water is remediated should be based on reasonably anticipated future beneficial uses and not to a predetermined drinking water standard. Practitioners are commonly forced to seek arbitrary means of defining short-term success or endure unending efforts to accomplish the impossible. The focus should be on maintaining adequate protection, using realistic risk assessment and effective remedial actions, as the measure of success. Risk assessments should be scientifically based and site specific, taking into consideration the impacts on public health and the environment. The application of risk assessment should consider both current and reasonably anticipated future uses of the property. For example, property zoned for industrial use may not need to be cleaned up to residential use standards. The clean up of such sites should, however, include a deed restriction or other institutional control indicating that contaminants remain on site; and that if site use changes, additional environmental assessment and cleanup may be appropriate.
- Source containment and ground water management should be considered viable remediation options; EPA should continue to focus research funding on developing new methods of remediation.
Commercially available technologies for contaminant source containment and ground water management are available for sites where complete contaminant source removal is not currently technically feasible and/or contaminants and site conditions do not lend themselves to clean up by natural processes. More funding will be required to find new and better remediation technologies.
The involvement of local and state governments in the corrective action decision-making process will help to ensure that remedy decisions are consistent with local land use plans and zoning requirements, as well as allow for any deed restrictions or necessary controls on the use of the site if contaminants remain.
- Realistic installation, operation, and maintenance cost considerations should more heavily influence remedy selections.
Because potentially long timeframes, up to many decades, are required to completely achieve cleanup goals for most remedy options, more emphasis should be placed on on-going operation and maintenance costs as well as the initial installation in selecting a remedy. A 1995 General Accounting Office report estimated that $32 billion (1994 dollars) in operation and maintenance costs will be spent through fiscal year 2040 for cleanup remedies undertaken through fiscal year 2004 (1995 General Accounting Office report, 2).
State and federal programs should also ensure in their decision-making that effective oversight mechanisms are in place that consider the full lifecycle costs of proposed remedies ("the long tail of cleanup"). Remedy selection should be flexible enough to allow for process modifications, if operation and maintenance data indicate problems with achieving cleanup goals.
To really address this on-going problem of Superfund's need to deal with both the remedial design and the "long tail" of reaching final cleanup of a site, NGWA encourages Congress to adopt a program within Superfund that is similar to the Price-Anderson Act used in the nuclear power industry.
- Actual site conditions should be used to determine remediation technology selections, not standardized, preapproved remedies.
Some state and federal programs have developed what is termed "presumptive remedies" for particular types of facilities or contaminant sources, such as landfills or wood treating operations. These presumptive remedies attempt to identify a particular pre-approved remedy approach that should be taken at these facilities. Standardizing the approach based on facility type does not adequately consider the range of parameters that may exist at these sites, including the exact contaminants present, local land usage, ground water conditions, nor whether human health or the environment is in actual danger. For example, not all paper plants may use the same chemicals. A presumptive remedy may fail to consider whether the facility is situated over a valuable drinking water source that provides water to a populated area or is located in an area where degraded (e.g. saline) water is beneath the site. Some sites may overlie contaminated aquifers in fractured rock while other sites may have contaminated those in unconsolidated sand and gravels. Some settings may naturally contain or isolate contaminants while in others contamination will be widespread. These situations are vastly different and may require different remediation technologies or require the same technology to be significantly modified. Flexibility and professional judgment must be encouraged so that appropriate—neither too many nor too few—technical, legal, institutional, and financial resources are applied at sites.
- The regulatory review process should be streamlined in the selection of remedies.
In the federal Superfund program, as with most state programs, extensive written evaluations, reporting and regulatory reviews of all possible remedies are required prior to selecting a preferred remedy.
Streamlining the process by requiring the responsible party to focus the review on the one or two most appropriate remedies for the site-specific situation would expedite moving from study to implementation. In many cases, it would be more feasible to implement a suitable remediation technology before the entire universe of remediation technologies had been thoroughly evaluated, reported on and scrutinized via the regulatory review process. An initial, expedited remedy decision, that maintains flexibility for later adjustments, is preferable to extensive remedy selection study that delays action and allows the contamination to spread and become more difficult and costly to control in the long term. Often, by the time the site is identified, and the Remedial Investigation/Feasibility Study and Record of Decision have been completed (usually a 7-10 year timeframe), the contamination has moved to a new place; and the investigation process must begin again. The interests of the government and public could be protected from potential abuse by maintaining the current procedure whereby the government has the final sign-off authority on a recommendation and has the option of requiring, at a later date, additional review and fine tuning of interim remedies, if the interim remedy selections are not effective.
- EPA should develop its own guidance criteria to determine appropriate property transfer site assessments.
In the area of site assessments performed in conjunction with a property transfer, we acknowledge the current structured approach offered by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) to reviewing these sites as a temporary measure. However, we recognize that improvements to this practice can be made and look forward to U.S. EPA developing its own guidance. In developing this guidance, the Agency should encourage the active participation of professionals and professional organizations, such as NGWA. EPA guidance should provide a framework, while allowing flexibility and the exercise of professional judgment for the varying site conditions encountered.
Future guidance should require that a direct inquiry be made of all government agencies in a region that can reasonably be expected to maintain relevant information. From region to region, environmental information is maintained by a variety of agencies, such as fire departments, health agencies, water quality control agencies, hazardous materials departments, air quality control boards, etc. The current ASTM practice requires an investigator to make only one direct agency inquiry (ASTM 1527-00 10.5.1). In many cases vital information, such as evidence of underground storage tanks and storage of hazardous materials, may be maintained at any one or more of these agencies. Electronic databases, while useful, frequently do not produce relevant historical information that is only maintained in paper records.
Additionally, any future guidance should require a more detailed assessment, involving additional on-site sampling of potentially contaminated media, if the potential presence of contaminants is identified at the site as a result of the phase I investigation.
Property transfer site assessments are relatively inexpensive, and individuals performing these studies may be inexperienced or untrained. While NGWA encourages EPA to develop technical guidance, such guidance is no substitute for the active involvement of qualified and trained professionals in property transfer site assessment work. The quality of information used for decision-making is commensurate with the experience and judgment of the investigator. Because the ultimate conclusions presented in a property transfer site assessment report require the investigator to form a technical opinion regarding the risk of environmental contamination, a technical understanding of these factors is essential.
- Voluntary cleanup programs should be supported.
Transaction costs, which include legal expenses associated with cleanups, are estimated to range from 17 to 33% of the total costs incurred by private parties held responsible under the Superfund program (1999 General Accounting Office, 10). Besides these identified transaction costs, sites where litigation is anticipated also experience increased cleanup costs.
To help reduce transaction and cleanup costs, NGWA recommends the development of a national framework to encourage voluntary cleanups. This framework refocuses resources on restoring sites to productive use early on in the process and thus protects public health and the environment. Legal agreements should be streamlined, so as to minimize negotiation time between the parties. Loans and grants, such as envisioned by Congress in Brownfields legislation, to support assessment, characterization and potential remedy measures could be productive.
Parties involved in Brownfields and voluntary cleanups have an incentive to make progress; namely, productive and profitable reuse of environmentally impaired property. Technical and scientific issues should be the drivers implementing site cleanups. Litigation issues should be few and legal costs minimal.
- A new approach to delisting of Superfund sites should be developed.
NGWA recommends that a new approach be taken regarding the delisting of Superfund sites. The current program requires that delisting occur after all cleanup goals have been achieved. This may take decades to centuries to accomplish. This long tail of responsibility under Superfund drastically limits the financial abilities (e.g. eligibility for bank loans, etc.) of potentially responsible parties.
NGWA recommends that these sites be delisted when an acceptable and approved remedy that protects human health and the environment has been initiated. The approved remediating site can then pass to state regulatory control for continued progress monitoring under state voluntary cleanup programs. This would rapidly remove Superfund sites from the listing while maintaining an appropriate level of regulatory scrutiny during continued remediation activities. Delisting sites under the above process would also allow more serious sites, that are not currently being addressed, to be added to the national priorities list of sites to be remediated.
- Prevention of ground water contamination is far cheaper than remediation.
The nation should place a stronger emphasis on ground water resource protection. Even with increased efforts to recycle and reuse materials and minimize hazardous waste generation and improper storage, we will continue to have chemical waste streams to manage. Therefore, public policy should promote improved landfill design specifications and the siting of landfills and industrial facilities in areas where impacts on ground water will be minimized. For example, public policy should encourage redevelopment of Brownfields sites for industrial use in metropolitan areas where water supply is not from ground water rather than locate industrial facilities in undeveloped areas that are future water supply sources.
Addendum
The role of the professional
Because ground water protection and contamination issues are complex, and errors can mean that either public health and the environment are not protected or precious resources are spent unnecessarily, it is critical to have qualified professionals, representing both the regulated and regulatory communities, involved in all phases of environmental assessment and remediation work. Among the ways to insure the involvement of qualified professionals are:
- Requiring that Superfund site management professionals, representing the regulated and regulatory communities, obtain professional certification or state registration, that includes continued professional education requirements.
- Expanding EPA's National Review Panel to include additional qualified public and private sector individuals, e.g. Department of Energy national laboratory personnel, professional association representatives, academicians, EPA research staff and State regulatory personnel.
- Providing grants for and encouraging States to use private sector licensed site professionals to supplement government expertise.
- Increasing federal funding of training and education for federal and state regulatory staff on technical subjects, in addition to regulatory and policy training.
While professionals should be held to a high standard of care in how they undertake their work, they should not be responsible for the contamination at the site, which they did not cause or for decisions based on limited available data. Contractors should be responsible only to the extent of their negligence.
References
Freeze, R. Allan, The Environmental Pendulum, The University of California Press, 2000.
U.S. EPA, Ground Water Cleanup at Superfund Sites, EPA 540-K-96 008, PB96-963310, December 1996.
U.S. General Accounting Office, Superfund: Information on the Program's Funding and Status, GAO/RCED-00-25, October 29, 1999.
U.S. General Accounting Office, Superfund: Operations and Maintenance Activities Will Require Billions of Dollars, GAO/RCED-95-259, September 29, 1995.
Date
Adopted by the Government Affairs Committee on March 7, 2001.