Environmental Damage Assessment Methods for Soil and Groundwater Contamination

Recently, soil and groundwater contamination incidents occur more frequently than before. Emerging environmental incidents call for litigations action on soil and groundwater damage investigation, which pushes forward establishing systematic methods to assess the resulted damage. Our study examined the differences between environmental damage assessment and traditional site investigation and risk assessment and focused on the methods for some key steps in damage assessment, including general procedure, baseline determination, causation judgment, restoration plan design, and loss assessment. Baseline was determined according to background levels, conditions in reference site, criteria, and model outputs. The causation judgment process can be divided into four steps: homology analysis, carrier and medium recognition, migration direction identification, and integrity and continuity analysis. Loss of soil and groundwater damage consists of cleanup cost, cost of primary restoration, cost of compensatory restoration, and cost of complementary restoration. Since certain phases and methods in soil and groundwater damage assessment overlap that of traditional site investigation and risk assessment, it is appropriate to incorporate the latter into the former. It’s also critical to develop separate guidelines and manuals for baseline determination, causation judgment, and loss assessment, to ensure incident investigation and damage assessment are scientific.