Risk-Based Corrective Action (RBCA) at Petroleum Contaminated Sites

Download or read book Risk-Based Corrective Action (RBCA) at Petroleum Contaminated Sites written by Hope Katcharian and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Risk-Based Corrective Action (RBCA) is a new phrase heard among engineers, researchers and regulators in the environmental remediation field. The phrase and acronym, pronounced like the name "Rebecca", represent a more enlightened, perhaps mature approach to old problems. RBCA is not a new technology but rather a formal framework for decision making when planning environmental remediation goals. I restrict my discussion to RBCA as applied to petroleum contaminated sites because they have recently emerged as the newest testing ground of the RBCA concept. Clearly, the key to developing objective cleanup criteria for soil and water remediation is to focus upon risk assessment. However, unlike polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin and lead, whose soil cleanup criteria were developed based upon their associated risks, cleanup criteria for petroleum contamination is generally not based upon human health risk. Instead, the criteria are almost as varied as the states that developed the standards. In 1991, a survey revealed that 42 out of 50 states utilize the measure of total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) in regulatory oversight and that soil cleanup goals spanned a range of 10 to 10,000 parts per million (ppm) TPll.3.