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Partnering with our regions and states for community resiliency - Mapping flood impacts on contaminated sites
Citation:
Shabani, A. AND S. Woznicki. Partnering with our regions and states for community resiliency - Mapping flood impacts on contaminated sites. 2019 Enterprise and Infrastructure Resilience Conference, Cincinnati, Ohio, August 12 - 13, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
This product, in the format of spatiotemporal contaminant distributions, interactive mapping, and models, will be used by partners to inform remedial planning that is consistent with contaminated sediments guidance, further monitoring (resampling) and clean-up activities leading to improved community resilience.
Description:
Partnering with Our Regions and States for Community Resiliency – Mapping Flood Impacts on Contaminated Sites ABSTRACT (250 word limit) The talk focuses on research framing and preliminary results to support EPA Regions, States and Communities partners’ objectives to assess contaminant transport in surface water and soil/sediment during flooding. The results of this Regional Sustainability and Environmental Sciences Research Program (RESES) project on an EPA Region 3 contaminated site will be used to inform clean-up planning and emergency preparedness. The study site consists of two landfills and includes the Eastwick Regional Park and a portion of the Eastwick residential neighborhood, both areas of potential environmental justice concern. Both landfills and the surrounding neighborhood have a history of flooding, and the community members have raised concerns of potential contaminant transport. Contaminants of concern at the site include PAHs, lead, and PCBs in creek sediment and soil. The technical objective of the research is to quantify potential flood-induced contaminant transport from the site across multiple flood return periods (i.e., 10, 50, 100 and 500-year floods). The research approaches are framed to understand the potential of flood-related contaminants fate-and-transport to further characterize the contaminated site. This research couples a one- and two-dimensional unsteady hydrodynamic model with EPA’s Water Quality Analysis Simulation Program to simulate flood inundation and contaminants in surface water, soils, and sediment. Potential Responsible Party sampled contaminants data is used to initiate, validate and quantify uncertainty in the model output. The visual product will be an interactive map that depicts spatiotemporal contaminant transport through the study area.