New Bedford Harbor Remediation Monitoring
ENSR has performed water and sediment quality monitoring to ensure that remediation dredging of one of the most contaminated sediment sites in the nation, New Bedford Harbor, does not result in a dispersal of PCBs and to track and document recovery of the harbor ecosystem. The project involves a staff with technical expertise in monitoring, ecology, geostatistics, restoration, chemistry, toxicology, and dredging.
During the Pre-Design Field Test, ENSR performed monitoring of pre- and post-dredge sediment concentrations to evaluate the effectiveness of the dredge. ENSR also performed evaluation of effluent toxicity following treatment of supernatant from the Confined Disposal Facility. This testing helped to evaluate the most effective and environmentally sound effluent treatment alternative.
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ENSR designed and implemented water quality monitoring programs to assess potential impacts during four subsequent dredging and construction operations in the harbor. These programs involved monitoring for turbidity, suspended solids, PCBs, and metals. Also, ENSR implemented state-of-the-art instrumentation and procedures to use turbidity as an indicator of PCB levels in order to streamline monitoring operations and reduce monitoring costs.
ENSR also performed predictive hydrodynamic and sediment transport modeling to predict potential water impacts from the dredging operation and to locate the most effective monitoring stations for the dredging operation. |
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