Department of Defense
facilities comprise a significant portion of toxic waste sites
throughout the United States. One such location that the EPA
recently considered labeling a Superfund site was the NASA Ames
Research Center in Mountain View, California. The research center
is adjacent to two present Superfund cleanup sites, the Middlefield-Ellis-Whisman
(MEW) site and the Moffett Naval Air Station, and as a consequence
was immediately downgradient to their commingled plumes. NASA’s
light industrial and research activities, combined with its
proximity to these neighboring Superfund sites, made it a potential
contributor to the contamination problem, known as a Potentially
Responsible Party (PRP). The EPA was also considering making
the NASA Ames facility a Superfund site in addition to its PRP
status.
When adjoining
sites are leaking contaminants, and the resulting plumes commingle,
it becomes more difficult to determine what percentage of the
problem is being caused by which site, and therefore it is harder
to assign responsibility for the cleanup. Analyzing constituent
concentrations over time can help, but it can be difficult to
detect an obvious pattern to the contamination without a logical
and easy way to get at the data to develop graphs, tables, and
maps for interpretation.
The stakes
were high. Being tagged as a Superfund site means fulfilling
a lengthy list of reporting requirements, public notifications,
and incurring significantly more costs in complying with government
regulations. To demonstrate that it should not be designated
a Superfund site, NASA had to give a clear picture of contamination
origins to the regulatory agencies. The only way to do that
was to access all the available data, including that from the
neighboring Superfund sites, and fold it into the data from
NASA’s own facility. This represented an enormous data
management problem, one that generic databases and commercial
spreadsheets are not designed to handle.
