Arizona’s Soil Remediation Rule: An Integrated Risk Assessment/Risk Management Program. T. L. Copeland and T. A. Koelsch, Enviro, Inc., 22365 El Toro Rd., Lake Forest, CA 92630
The Soil Remediation Standards Rule, approved by the State of Arizona in December of 1997, provides to property owners a cost effective mechanism for ensuring protection of human health and groundwater quality at sites where chemicals have been released to soil. This paper describes the Rule development process, the scientific components of the Rule, discusses how risk assessment is applied in regulatory compliance and "voluntary’ programs, and presents case studies which illustrate the role of risk assessment in remedial action planning for soil and groundwater. The Soil Remediation Standards Rule was developed to facilitate a tiered approach to risk assessment. The tiered approach provides predetermined safe soil concentrations (Soil Remediation Levels for human health and Groundwater Protection Levels for groundwater quality), as well as an option for conducting a site-specific risk assessment to determine site-specific safe soil concentrations. The paper will illustrate applications of the SRLs/ GPLs and site-specific risk analysis, will discuss the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality’s Draft Deterministic Risk Assessment Guidance and Arizona’s framework for probabilistic risk assessment, and will discuss how deterministic and probabilistic risk assessment results are applied to risk management decisions. A case study will be presented to illustrate the process.
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