The ultimate goal of the Air Force Real Property Agency (AFRPA) is to quickly return Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) properties to useful purposes while providing enhanced protection of human health and the environment. To meet this goal, AFRPA identifies and promotes cost-effective remediation methods, accelerates the close out of restored sites, and facilitates property re-use. Facing continuous Congressional scrutiny over the rate of property transfer and an impending fifth BRAC round of the magnitude of the previous four rounds, the AFRPA was seeking existing sources of remedial system performance information to improve remedy performance and accelerate site closeout.

Early in 2003, AFRPA and PPC recognized the possible value of data contained in CERCLA five-year review reports and set out to mine the data contained and presented in the five-year review reports with the intent of using existing remedy performance and optimization evaluations to look at remedy system performance on an Agency-wide scale.

In collaboration with the EPA Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation, PPC identified and reviewed the 82 available Department of Defense five-year review reports. Using practitioners skilled in remediation technologies as well as regulatory analysis and compliance, PPC mined critical base and remedy information down to the operable unit level and compiled that information into standard categories in a Microsoft Access database. Then PPC extracted and analyzed data from the federal facility five-year reviews to discover common problems identified by the regulators; to evaluate technical performance issues associated with common remedies; to determine the reasons remedies are deemed not protective; and to identify corrective measures most frequently required at various types of sites.

Today, the AFRPA is communicating the trends and lessons learned from this initial analysis to field personnel responsible for working with regulators to make remedial decisions and developing strategies to share throughout the Agency. By creating and using an Agency-wide system to evaluate remedial systems, AFRPA is aggressively identifying and outlining its remediation liabilities, needs, and opportunities for system improvement and optimization that would not be possible with a smaller (installation level) data set. This analysis is accelerating site transfer and contributing to productive reuse of Federal property. While the AFRPA and PPC have begun identifying performance trends and optimization opportunities, additional research and evaluation is planned in conjunction with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy.

TOOLS
Remedy Performance Analysis
Issues Recommendation