A Review of Lessons Learned After Nearly Three Decades of Environmental Dredging in the United States
Type:
Presented during:
WODCON XX: "The Art of Dredging" - 2013, Brussels, Belgium
Authors:
Doody J P, Gardner R, Mohan R
Abstract: In the United States of America (USA), environmental dredging has been used for almost 30 years to remove contaminated sediments for the purpose of site cleanup. Contaminated sediment cleanup has been implemented under a number of regulatory frameworks, and one of the commonly used tools, dredging, has often been used for removing contamination with an aim to reduce potential risks to human health and the environment. As would be expected, there are valuable lessons from these projects, including positive and negative aspects, which can help inform current and future projects around the world. Many of the lessons learned have been considered and recognized in recent guidance documents developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA, 2005) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE; Bridges et al., 2008; USACE, 2008), as well as in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) study on the effectiveness of environmental dredging (NAS, 2007).
This paper provides an overview of the history of environmental dredging in the USA, highlighting some of the more important lessons learned and how they have informed subsequent projects. The performance of these projects are evaluated to determine where progress has been made, and also to identify areas requiring further improvement.
Keywords: environmental dredging, contaminated sediments, adaptive management, remediation case studies