Brownfield Tip of the Month (March) - Ranking Criteria #1 - Community Need - Health Effects and Chemicals of Concern (Atrazine)

For the EPA Brownfield Assessment Grant, ten (10) points are assigned to the criterion where you "describe the effect brownfields have on your targeted community by providing information on the number and size of the brownfields and the health, welfare, and environmental impacts of these sites...."  This is sometimes difficult to measure, particularly when trying to draw a link between brownfield contamination and community health.  It is also a slippery slope since it may be a stretch to say that groundwater that is perched and 50 feet deep that is contaminated with metals is impacting a community that gets 100% of its drinking water from an entirely different (and deeper) aquifer.  Also, do you really want to give the targeted community the impression that their groundwater is contaminated and that it is impacting their health.

When it comes to Surface Water, however, here's an idea.  Assessment and management of pesticides require far more information than we can afford to directly measure for all the places, times, and pesticides of interest. In addition, many decisions-such as setting monitoring priorities, approving registration of a new pesticide, and determining how much to spend on a management strategy-inherently depend on predicting the potential effects of pesticides on water quality for locations or amounts of use that have never been directly assessed. In these situations, statistical models and other types of models are used for predicting water-quality conditions at unmonitored locations under a range of possible circumstances.

The National Water Quality Assessment (NAWQA) Program is developing a series of statistical models, based on monitoring data and watershed characteristics, to enable estimation of pesticide concentrations for streams that have not been monitored. The Watershed Regression for Pesticides models are referred to as WARP models. The first completed WARP model is for atrazine, one of the most heavily used herbicides in the United States (Figure 1).

Consider using the NAWQA Program model in your October Grant Submittal.

Good Luck!