SUMMARY OF THE REMEDIATION TECHNOLOGIES DEVELOPMENT FORUM
SEDIMENTS REMEDIATION ACTION TEAM
NATURAL RECOVERY SUBGROUP CONFERENCE CALL

1:00 p.m.-3:00 p.m.
January 16, 2002

On January 16, 2002, members of the Remediation Technologies Development Forum's (RTDF's) Sediments Remediation Action Team, Natural Recovery Subgroup, met with members of the Anacostia Watershed Toxics Alliance (AWTA) via conference call. The following people participated:

Sarah Dun of Eastern Research Group, Inc., (ERG) was also present.

THE CONTAMINATED SEDIMENT MANAGEMENT STRATEGY DOCUMENT

AWTA and the Anacostia Watershed Restoration Committee are working on a document called Contaminated Sediment Management Strategy, which describes the management strategy proposed for the Anacostia River. The document is currently being compiled. Mike Buchman said that he is in charge of pulling the chapters together and giving the document an editorial review. In addition, he is the project leader for the document's monitoring chapter. Buchman said that he has been asking for input on the document, and that he recently received text from several RTDF members, including John Davis, Victor Magar, and Richard Jensen. Buchman thanked them for their contributions, and said that he welcomes suggestions from other people as well. He asked that all those who submit text in the future include cost estimates for the monitoring schemes they propose.

The information that Jensen submitted to Buchman generated discussion during this conference call. Jensen submitted a short narrative describing the Anacostia River's history. In this text, Jensen indicated that the river has experienced tremendous siltation over the last 200 years. Buchman said that he has found data to the contrary, but Diane Douglas cited a passage from a book that supports Jensen's claims. Call participants suggested doing the following to clear up the confusion:

• Ask Lawson Smith (of the Army Corps of Engineers) to provide information on his understanding of the river's geomorphology.



• Contact the author that Douglas cited to determine where he obtained his information.



• Perform additional research at the Bladensburg library to determine whether old nautical charts or maps are available to clear up the discrepancy.

Call participants also discussed the need to collect additional cores from the Anacostia River. Jensen noted that David Velinsky of the Academy of Natural Sciences collected some cores in the mid-1990s. The results indicated that several feet of sediments were heavily contaminated, and that concentrations were fairly uniform throughout the column; concentrations did not diminish at the surface. Some of the information provided by the coring samples, Jensen said, is confusing. For example, the cores suggest that polychlorinated biphenyls were present in the river long before the chemicals had actually been invented. Such anomalies raise questions about the data. For this reason, Jensen said, additional samples should be collected from areas that have not been dredged. This will help improve investigators' understanding of what is happening to the river. Jensen said that Velinsky is considering collecting some additional core samples this year; he advised having RTDF members collaborate in this sampling effort. Buchman asked call participants to indicate what they hoped to learn by collecting additional cores. Conference call participants listed the following benefits:

• Determine whether natural recovery is possible. Jensen said that it is important to find out whether a clean layer is forming at the top of the sediment column. If it is not, this suggests that influences from ongoing sources are overpowering natural recovery processes.



• Determine the stability of the sediments structure. If a significant amount of "noise" is revealed in the sediment column profile, Mike Erickson said, this may indicate past erosion events and will tell investigators something about disturbance patterns.

Buchman said that he will send call participants a draft of the monitoring chapter during the week of February 4, 2002. The RTDF-AWTA team will meet via conference call during the week of February 11 to discuss the chapter. The chapter will also be discussed during an RTDF-AWTA meeting that is scheduled to take place in Baltimore (on the afternoon of March 13, 2002) and Annapolis (on March 14 2002).

Call participants talked briefly about the remediation chapter that is being written for the Contaminated Sediment Management Strategy. Jensen offered to help with this section, and said that Danny Reible may be able to provide some input as well. (Reible has proposed a capping pilot program for the Anacostia.) Jensen also stressed that it is important to make sure that the historical background provided for the river is consistent in the monitoring, remediation, and conceptual model chapters.