Impact Area Review Team Meeting
Bourne Best Western
Bourne Massachusetts
January 25, 2001
6:00 p.m.

Meeting Summary

Handouts Distributed at Meeting:

1. Draft Agenda

2. November 28, 2000 draft Meeting Minutes

3. Status of November 28, 2000 Action items

4. Unexploded Ordnance (UXO) Discoveries/Dispositions Since 11-28 IART

5. Letter: The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services Department of Public Health, January 25, 2001

6. Letter: United States Environmental Protection Agency, Region 1, January 4, 2001

7. United States Environmental Protection Agency, Region I, EPA Docket No.: RCRA 1-2001-0014; Administrative Order for Use of Controlled Detonation Chamber for Regulated Munitions Wastes

8. Statement from the National Guard Bureau at the January 25, 2001 Public Hearing on Draft Unilateral Administrative Order, EPA Docket# RCRA-1-2001-0014

9. Munitions Survey Project, IART Briefing – Tetra Tech, Inc.

10. Presentation Handout: Demo Area 1, Draft Groundwater Report

11. Presentation Handout: IAGWSP Investigations Update, AMEC

12. Presentation Handout: Small Arms Range Air and Soil Sampling, AMEC

13. Presentation Handout: Army National Guard, Impact Area Groundwater Study Program, CPT Bill Myer, MMR Environmental Restoration Chief

Agenda Item #1. Welcome, Approval of September 7, 2000 Meeting Minutes, Review Action Items
and Draft Agenda

At 6:00 p.m., Mr. Murphy said, "OK People, I’d like to get started. So if team members could take their seats please? And start off with the introductions of the people sitting at the table for the benefit of everyone who is not sitting at the table, and if we could start down this end with you, Richard…"

Mr. Hugus said, "I’m Richard Hugus, a citizen of Falmouth and a founding member of the Impact Area Review Team."
Mr. Zanis said, "Paul Zanis, Resident of Sandwich."
Mr. Schlesinger said, "Peter Schlesinger, Sandwich"
Ms. Dolan said, "Jane Dolan, EPA"
Mr. Borci said, "Todd Borci, EPA"
Mr. Walsh-Rogalski said, "Bill Walsh-Rogalski, EPA"
Ms. Adams said, "Margery Adams, EPA"
Mr. Murphy said, "Jim Murphy. I’m from EPA, I’m the facilitator"
Ms. DeBaggis said, "Deirdre DeBaggis, CH2M HILL"
Mr. Deleppo said, "Darrell Deleppo with the Army Corps of Engineers"
Mr. Gregson said, "Ben Gregson, Groundwater Study Office"
LTC Knott said, "Joe Knott, National Guard Bureau"
Dr. Stahl said, "Jim Stahl, TOSC"
Dr. Culligan said, "Trish Culligan, Technical Advisor for the citizens"
Mr. Taylor said, "Ray Taylor, Sandwich resident"
Mr. Cody said, "Sean Cody, Massachusetts National Guard"
LTC Bailey said, "LTC Don Bailey, Massachusetts National Guard"
CPT Myer said, "Bill Myer, Impact Groundwater Study Office"
Ms.Drakesaid,"Jan Drake,MADEP"
Ms. Grillo said, "Ellie Grillo, DEP"
Mr. Aker said, "Marty Aker, AFCEE/MMR"

Mr. Murphy said, "Thanks. The people standing up, there’s also seats over here; I know there’s still seats back there, and some people like to stand. That’s fine also."

Approval of Minutes

Mr. Murphy said, "Looking at the November 28 minutes, I just wanted to see if anyone had any comments or changes on the minutes. Richard."

Mr. Hugus said, "Perchlorate, I’m not sure where it is later on in the minutes. It’s not two words, it is one. Page 5, five paragraphs up from the bottom, ‘Ms. Adams stated she can not speak to the rational of B.G. Keefe’ that should be ‘rationale.’ On page 8, ‘Upper Cape’ should be capitalized, third paragraph down. Let other people get in if I’m - Page 25 under ‘Background Soil Concentrations Methodology’ the third line down it should be, instead of ‘cleanup the background’ to the extent feasible, it should be ‘cleanup to background." And then page 27 on the first line, it starts with the misspelling of perchlorate. And on page 33, I’m sure DEP would point this out, but the presenter was - fifth paragraph down - it’s not ‘Mr. Dahn’, it is ‘Mr. Dayian’. And in the same paragraph, mentioned ‘sensory wells’ and that should be ‘sentry wells’, and again ‘sentry wells’ on page 34. So just light, small problems."

Mr. Murphy said, "Thanks Richard. I note DEP has asked we hold approval of the minutes, not approve them at this meeting because the two staff members who made the presentation last month did not get a chance to review the minutes. So I would like to hold them before we approve them. We can approve them next meeting. Any additional comments? Marc."

Mr. Grant said, "Page 20…"

Mr. Murphy said, "Could you just introduce yourself, Marc."

Mr. Grant said, "Marc Grant, AMEC Environmental. Page 23, second paragraph, second sentence displayed a map of the ‘J-1-3-L’, that’s kind of a nomenclature that we use for that work plan that covers three different ranges. There is a global change: I think any word that says ‘tract’ should be ‘track’, talks about particle tracks rather than particle tracts. Page 25, first paragraph, the word ‘tic’ should be ‘capital T capital I capital C’, that’s an abbreviation for ‘tentatively identified compounds’. Page 29, third paragraph, last sentence, ‘the three SVOC’s were’ and this chemical name is bis-2 ethylhexylphthalate, next paragraph down the word ‘invalidated’ would be better said, ‘not’: two words, ‘not validated’. Page 26, first paragraph under ‘Update on Demo 1’ second to last sentence, ‘profile results are 0.3 and 1.5 ppb RDX which are not (‘not’ is the missing word) not above health advisory."

Mr. Murphy said, "Thanks a lot. Any additional comments on the minutes? Jan."

Ms. Drake said, "Richard got ‘Larry Dayian’, and ‘sentry wells’, but discreet global change ‘d-i-s-c-r-e-t-e’ in this setting."

Mr. Murphy said, "Thank you, so we’re all set. We’re going to hold the approval of the minutes until next month at the request of DEP. Looking at the agenda, there was - we made an adjustment in the agenda from the draft agenda that people received in the mail. And that was to - previously under 8:30 we were going to have a discussion of EPA Administrative Order number 4. Now we have moved it up to 8:00, and we will suspend the Impact Area Review Team meeting and have a public hearing on the Administrative Order for use of the controlled detonation chamber – contained – excuse me, CDC, you get stuck on the acronyms and forget what the real words mean. Anybody have any other changes to the agenda before we go ahead? Richard."

Mr. Hugus said, "May I have 5 minutes to discuss two topics? One: the production of a map for the base-wide plumes - and two: a fact sheet, a new fact sheet."

Mr. Murphy said, "OK. So, we can put those under ‘other issues’. Jan, did you have - OK moving on to the…"

Mr. Cambareri said, "I was curious and would like an update on how the issue with the profiling upgradient of the water supply wells went on. There was a great deal of conversation, and a number of forums across Cape Cod. It seemed as if the JPO was on a road to listen to what was said in those forums."

Mr. Murphy said, "OK, if we can put that under ‘Other Issues’ I’m not sure who will address it at the time, but we’ll - I’m sure Todd will have something to say.

I’m looking at the action items. There was one change in the action items that are on people’s tables tonight. Under number six there was just a slight change in the language of the status and that was just to make it a little bit more clear. We can cover that when we get down to it."

Agenda Item #2. Review of Action Items

1. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) agreed to communicate directly with BG Keefe regarding the issue of making the ammunition supply point (ASP) inventory available to the public. Status: EPA has contacted CPT Sciaraffa of GEN Keefe’s office and is coordinating a response.

   Mr. Walsh-Rogalski said, "I spoke with CPT Sciaraffa, Legal counsel for MA Guard, and we agreed on an approach that would allow EPA - first of all it would require the MA Guard to develop a comprehensive and comprehensible inventory of the ASP. Todd Borci, on behalf of EPA, would then inspect the ASP with this inventory to see whether or not it was accurate. We wouldn’t then take the inventory because it would then be subject to FOIA. So their concern is that the document would become public, our concern is we can’t hold a document such as that, from the public. This is an interim step, we still haven’t figured out how to make this information available to the public, but we both agreed that as at least one way to move forward, we could create this inventory and inspect the ASP and find out what was in there and the EPA would not leave with any kind of written document."

   Mr. Murphy said, "Richard, you have a comment?"

   Mr. Hugus said, "Yeah, about the ASP. I approve of EPA sending Todd Borci to look at the contents of the ASP, but still maintain that the public has a Right-to-know what the contents of that supply point are, and don’t want that to be lost sight of. I know that MADEP is looking into Right-to-know provisions on this issue and I’d like to hear what they’ve come up with on that."

   Mr. Pinaud said, "I’m sorry, was the question that DEP was looking into Right-to-know issues?"

   Mr. Hugus said, "Yes, according to minutes of the technical meeting, I believe."

   Mr. Pinaud said, "I do not recall that. I don’t believe we are."

   Mr. Hugus said, "Well, maybe I can ask that you and EPA do so, look into community Right-to-know policies and see if we do have standing there. As I said before, it was only because the community did become involved in what was going on at Camp Edwards that we have found and uncovered all the damage and contamination that has been uncovered. And I don’t think a door should be shut on us on this issue because of the Guard’s claim of national security or just plain security at this point, because this issue has been debated for so long anybody who cared to know would have found out by now that the ASP is not even guarded. So this just made matters worse for the National Guard in terms of what they say they are worried about."

   Mr. Walsh-Rogalski said, "One point, Richard. We did at one point, research the Federal EPCRA; the Community Right-to-know law, and at that point phosphorus was the only thing that would have triggered Right-to-know in a minimum threshold and wasn’t reached at that point. That’s my memory of the research that we did, so maybe after this inventory is done and Todd takes a look at it, we can take a look at the thresholds again. But at least the last time no thresholds were triggered, and assuming that the inventory has decreased as has been represented I don’t think EPCRA, the federal law, is triggered."

   Mr. Hugus said, "Sorry, I must have confused EPA with DEP on this issue. But do I understand that when it comes to explosives the community doesn’t have any right-to-know grounds. Is that correct?

   Mr. Walsh Rogalski said, "I’m hesitant to answer that without taking a look at it specifically. All that I remember is last time I looked, and the only thing that was on the ultra-hazardous list that we thought would have been stored there was white phosphorus. And that would have been the thing that triggered it, but I’ll go back and look at it again."

   Mr. Murphy said, "Len."

   Mr. Pinaud said, "I’d like to know if the Guard has a position on this Right-to-know issue? Either the Guard Bureau or the Massachusetts Guard?"

   Mr. Cody said, "This is Sean Cody with the Massachusetts National Guard. I believe that CPT Sciaraffa and Mr. Walsh-Rogalski were discussing that. So the Massachusetts National Guard’s position is that it doesn’t want to give out the inventory due to security reasons."

   Mr. Murphy said, "Peter."

   Mr. Schlesinger said, "I think we’ve gone this route before, but why won’t they give out constituents if they won’t give out the actual rounds. Why can’t you just tell us what’s in them? I mean really, we’re trying to work together, we’re not being confrontational about it, we are trying to get a job done. Why can’t you just tell us what the constituents are? We can calculate the quantities we know from the previous inventory what was there, but if you could tell us the constituents of those materials at least we could make some calculations."
   

   LTC Bailey said, "I think we have been talking about this for a long time, and the discussion has elevated well above my level. If it was an easy answer it would have been resolved long before now, that’s why it is between the legal people, whatever they work out is what they work out. There is not much more that I can add to that."

   Mr. Murphy said, "OK. Are we ready to move on?"

2. Dr. Feigenbaum requested the Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to look into whether potential contractors can present their qualifications at an IART meeting. Status: The IART can review the draft evaluation criteria that will be used in the RFP; however, after checking with Corps Contracting and Legal Counsel personnel, Federal Procurement Regulations do not allow for potential contractors to present their qualifications to the IART during the procurement process.

   Mr. Deleppo said, "I can answer…"

   Mr. Murphy said, "OK. There is a written answer, if people want to go through each one of those that’s what we’ll do or if - I guess that’s what we’ll do unless somebody wants to skip any and…"

   Mr. Zanis said, "There is a question from the audience."

   Mr. Murphy said, "I just saw that. After Darrell speaks, if anybody from the audience has a question - if you could just come up to the microphone, that would help me see and recognize you, after Darrell…"

   Mr. Deleppo said, "On action item number two, this question from Joel. The history on this is that the Corps is going to hire a contractor to do work at MMR. And the question was - I think revolves around the input that the IART can have on the selection of that contractor. And I’ve been asked to check into during the presentation - or of there is going to be presentations of the contractor qualifications - if they could be done at an IART meeting. And after checking with the folks that work on this in the Contracting and Legal Counsel at our office in Concord, the regulations don’t allow for that - for any kind of presentation during the selection process of the contractor to be open to the public. So we are not allowed to do that.

   But, I also have stated in the past about finding a way to get your input on the selection criteria that we’re going to use, and what I want to say tonight is that I think in the next mailing I can send out what that criteria would look like. I can send you a copy of a previous solicitation that we’ve done that is probably going to be used as a model for the new one. The new one hasn’t been approved yet through the Corps Higher Headquarters and that’s probably not likely to happen until the end of March timeframe and that’s when the actual proposal will go out to the public. And then again, then it will be open to the public and anybody can see it. But to get your input ahead of time, we’re trying to get you some information, I guess next week will be the next mailing; and then get your feedback by the next IART meeting, which is, I think the twenty-eighth of February?"

   Mr. Murphy said, "Tuesday, February 27, is what we’re going to discuss at the end of the meeting."

   Mr. Deleppo said, "So that’s our plan for that, to get your input on that criteria before we send it out."

   Mr. Murphy said, "Thanks, Darrell. Dick."

   Mr. Judge said, "Thank you for taking me out of order. I’ve got a selectman’s meeting to jump over to. Just a quick comment and it does have to do with the Administrative Order number four. As an SMB member I was surprised to wake up this morning to the paper and read what I read, considering there were plenty of opportunities for late breaking news at the SMB meeting last night. I just would like to make sure that we continue to get information as soon as possible and that perhaps Joe, you can answer to this, maybe why it wasn’t brought up last night under late breaking news?"

   LTC Knott said, "Hi Dick. AO4? I had two slides and we went through it."

   Mr. Judge said, "No, that you were not going to - was I sleeping through it - that you were going to contest the AO4."

   Mr. Murphy said, "You were busy facilitating the meeting."

   LTC Knott said, "Actually, on the second slide, the last bullet, it said in general that we were going to send a letter and that we were going to request and meet with the Administrator from EPA headquarters under the RCRA, the Order."

   Mr. Judge said, "Thanks Joe. My mistake, thank you."

   Mr. Murphy said, "David…"

   Mr. Dow said, "This is David Dow with the Sierra Club. When we had our Community Working Group meeting on Friday over in Sandwich, I raised the issue of finding out what kind of hazardous substances were in the munitions storage area. Because, when we develop our plan - which is supposed to be submitted to us by March thirty-first by the Massachusetts Army National Guard - we actually have to know what kind of hazardous substances are there. I’m not concerned about what kinds of rounds and stuff, but to coordinate the environmental performance standards and the compatible training, you actually need to know this, and this issue wasn’t addressed in our drafts. But I presume the Massachusetts Army National Guard is going to address it in the final environmental impact report and master plan. So I would second Peter’s suggestion."

   Mr. Murphy said, "Thanks, David. OK, the next action item – Oh - I didn’t see your card, if you - I do have new glasses tonight Joel, I still didn’t see the card."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Well, are they just for reading or."

   Mr. Murphy said, "No, well I can see about as far as you."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "I’m not going to add to the lengthy discussion we’ve already had about the Guard stonewalling on the supply point. I mean, I’m opposed to this holding up of information but it is up to the EPA attorneys, I guess. There are lawyers to take care of this so there is not much we can do except invade the supply point I suppose, but that’s probably not advisable."

   Mr. Walsh-Rogalski said, "If you do that, get an inventory on the way out."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "OK, I’ll probably get an inventory of lead in our bellies. So the answer here is no, we can’t be a part of the selection process of the contractors, is that right?"

   Mr. Deleppo said, "Yes."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "And who is going to do that? Is that going to be the Corps? Or is that going to be the Guard?"

   Mr. Deleppo said, "That will be the Corps of Engineers"

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "So the Guard is giving over that authority to the Corps? I’d be curious what allows the Guard to just transfer its authority. This is one of the major concerns of the cleanup, a good contractor do a good job. A lousy contractor is going to do a lousy job, and considering the Corps just came into town, it seems kind of strange that they would then have this whole authority. Can anyone explain that?"

   Mr. Murphy said, "Len do you want to comment?"

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "I’m looking for an explanation of where the Corps all of a sudden gets this authority."

   Mr. Deleppo said, "Well, the Guard has designated the Army Corps of Engineers as the supervising contractor. And we were in the business of doing this type of environmental work. And they have basically designated us to do that and given us the authority to use our contracting mechanisms - which are the same as the Guard and the same federal acquisitions regulations they would use to hire a contractor. We’ll follow the same rules that they would have followed, and hire this contractor for them."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "So they can’t, the Guard can’t hire their own contractors? Is that what you are saying? They don’t have the ability? I mean, what’s going on here?"

   LTC Knott said, "I think your confused, Joel, with what’s going on here."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "I am."

   LTC Knott Said, "Let me help you out. The contract that is referenced here, that you’re talking to Darrell about being part of the selection process, is a Corps of Engineers contract. A term - not to bring in any acronyms to confuse people - but is a ‘Corps contract’.

   The contract that AMEC, formerly Ogden is under, is a National Guard Bureau contract. And the follow on the National Guard Bureau contract, again is a National Guard Bureau contract that has been going on. The solicitation is out, AMEC has put in and various other companies.

   The confusion is that we have got that Guard contract that is replacing the Ogden contract, that’s going on, that is a Guard contract. The Corps is a 100 million dollar contract that is centered on MMR. Not all the work will be done here, but it is centered on MMR to help. Another tool in the toolbox for the Corps, to meet the requirements here, so it is a Corps of Engineers contract. It’s not the AMEC contract that is not making sense. It is a couple of contracts out there - and this is a Corps of Engineers contract, and that’s why their doing their contract."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "But it could have been done, just the other out and through the Guard contract, right?"

   LTC Knott said, "The Guard contract is still going on, we’re still pursuing. It’s been going on for I’m guessing, about a year or so for that procurement. These are multiple contracts too. Again, more tools in the toolbox to do the best job that we can."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Is this for the cleanup of the contaminated water, the explosives, is the soil…what are we talking about here?"

   Mr. Deleppo said, "The contract will be able to be used to do any kind of environmental work on the base, so studies, design and cleanup. All those different things."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "So all that could have been done under a Guard contract though."

   Mr. Deleppo said, "That’s right."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "But the Guard has somehow chosen to hand over its authority to the Corps."

   Mr. Deleppo said, "Not the authority. Just the contracting effort will be done by the Corps for the Guard."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "But that’s the authority to choose a contractor. This is pretty straight forward, right? The Guard is saying to the Corps, you choose the contractor that we would have chosen if you weren’t here."

   LTC Knott said, "No, Joel, we’ve got 2 separate contract actions. Both the National Guard Bureau contract - which is out now going on covers all things also - through cleanup and remediation. The Corps of Engineers has a separate contract that covers all things: cleanup, study information. Both those contracts will be available for use in the Groundwater Study."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Well how are you going to determine which contract - it sounds like duplication."

   Mr. Deleppo said, "Let me offer this as an example of how it works. The - we’re going to talk about the CDC later. The CDC being here, it was brought here under a Corps of Engineers contract. The Guard asked the Corps to get it and bring it here and a Corps of Engineers contract was used to do it. So again, the Guard is going to ask the corps to work on the cleanup. And they have a choice of using their own contracts or asking us to do it. It is the way the Army does business all across the nation. That is just the way the Army does business. The Corps of Engineers is an engineering organization that’s available to any part of the Army; in fact, the EPA uses the same contracts. They have hired the Corps to cleanup superfund sites using these same type of contracts."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Well, be that as it may; why is it not possible for us to interview potential contractors? Apart from - obviously nobody would be asking to see the bids if there are competitive bids, but why can’t we talk to these people? What is the legal bar against that?"

   Mr. Deleppo said, "Maybe it would be helpful if - tonight our counsel, legal counsel from the Concord office is here. Her name is Mary Byers and maybe she can help explain that a little better than I could."

   Mr. Murphy said, "If you could just use the microphone back there."

   Ms. Byers said, "I’m Mary Byers. I am the district counsel for the New England District Corps of Engineers. I think your question is; why can’t you be part of the selection process, is that correct?"

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "That’s what I said."

   Ms. Byers said, "OK, I just want to verify that that is the question you have. Under the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which is the way we do federal procurements in the government, and under the Procurement Integrity Act - only government employees or contractors of the government can be part of the evaluation process.

   The reason is we have to keep proprietary information confidential and we cannot release it to the public because we cannot guarantee that those people who see it would not release it. Those members of the boards are required to sign statements that have potential criminal sanctions for releasing any information. In fact, if they leave the government they have to ensure that they can’t release that information for 5 years. So they are required to keep the information proprietary. That includes all the competitive process, the bids, the proposals, any of the technical information, all that information that is presented in proposals by contractors and reviewed. And the competitive determinations are made and a selection is made. That is all confidential and proprietary until there is an award. And even parts of those contracts, those proposals; for example, would not be released to the public after an award is made because they are confidential and proprietary. So we’re trying to ensure that the competitive bidding process is secure. And that is under the Federal Acquisition Regulation, and Federal Procurement Integrity Act."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Well, that really doesn’t answer my question." Mr. Murphy said, "OK Joel, I was going to let COL Murphy respond and then I think Len had a comment and then maybe we can try to move on, maybe you can talk to them more after the meeting."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Well, this is a subject for long discussion. Last time around we were kind of shocked that Ogden, a.k.a whatever they are now - AMEC, wasn’t just going to continue sort of automatically. And, you know, we had a long discussion about how we can be involved in the process to make sure it was all above board and we have enough doubts about the Corps, let alone their favorite contractors; and so now you’re saying let’s move this out and I’ll talk to somebody later."

   Mr. Murphy said, "Let’s see what COL Murphy has to say, and then Lenny, and then we’ll see."

   COL Murphy said, "Basically what I was asking Jim - I’m Richard Murphy from the National Guard Bureau - basically just that, that we do move on. I think what we are doing is within the order. I think that Joel has been noted that he doesn’t like the process. But this is not, it’s not a scheme to do anything. We are simply widening the availability of the process that we knead into this. And I would ask that you try to keep the meeting on track and not have it diverted quite so long. There are other more relevant issues that really need to be discussed. We’re not attempting to do anything wrong. And I think Joel’s concerns should appropriately be noted, and let the meeting go on to some more relevant issues."

   Mr. Murphy said, "Len."

   Mr. Pinaud said, "You can correct me if I am wrong but I thought that AO1 and AO3 said something about EPA concurrence with contractors selected. And I know that doesn’t speak directly as to what the action item is, but it might give the team some comfort if they know that EPA has to concur with the contractor issue."

   Mr. Murphy said, "Both orders provide that EPA approves supervisor contractors and all subs. OK, and Richard you have a comment also, and then I’d like to move it along if we could."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "I’d like to come back."

   Mr. Murphy said, "You get one more shot."

   Mr. Hugus said, "Yeah, I think we can spend time on this, it is after all our…the whole future work here. As one of the people who asked for citizen involvement in selecting a contractor, I made it clear that we didn’t want proprietary information about contractors. We just wanted to know what their record was. And from my point of view this is sort of like the ammo supply point issue. The military’s coming in and saying essentially the citizens, the public don’t have the right to democratic involvement. It is the same thing and in one case it is because of national security, or security; and in this case it has to do with so-called proprietary information. And to me this is just a subverting of democratic procedure."

   Mr. Murphy said, "Joel?"

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Yeah, see, I don’t - the lawyer didn’t answer my question, maybe you could."

   Ms. Byers said, "It’s prohibited by law. That is the answer."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "What is? Now, what is prohibited by law is revealing to us proprietary information. But is it prohibited by law for a prospective contractor to come here and tell us what kind of work they’ve done in the past?"

   Ms. Byers said, "It is prohibited for us to release any information about any contractor during the evaluation process. Our evaluators are not even supposed to know the names of the contractors, OK. They are supposed to look at them as if they don’t know who they are, look at them technically, and make determinations…"

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "So then it’s not just a question of proprietary interest.

   Ms. Byers said, "That’s what we’re trying to protect, under the law."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "But if a contractor came in here and said, well I worked at Pease air force base and did such and such a cleanup, what is proprietary about that?"

   Ms. Byers said, "The problem is that I wouldn’t be able to tell you who those contractors were until after we have made a selection. We are not allowed to release any information about the proposers for a contract until after a contract has been awarded."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "So the issue of proprietary acknowledges…that’s a red herring."

   Ms. Byers said, "No, its not."

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "You’re just not allowed to release any information."
   
   Ms. Byers said, "But we’re trying to protect proprietary information, that’s the reason why the federal procurement law…"

   Dr. Feigenbaum said, "So you think if we found out that they worked at Pease air force base that somehow we’d be able to sneak under the table and find out proprietary information? It doesn’t make sense."

   Mr. Murphy said, "Joel, I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere with this one tonight, if you want to…"

   Dr. Feigenbaum interrupted, "But these people are preparing to spend something, like a quarter of a billion dollars on this project and I think the public has some interest in making sure that this is not just a sweetheart deal between the Corps and one of their favorite contractors. I don’t know what protection there is in this thing."

   Ms. Byers said, "There is no such thing as a favorite contractor in procurement law. It is fairly competed, that’s why we have the procurement laws."

   Mr. Murphy said, "OK Thank you. Moving along to number three."
   

3. Mr. Hugus requested that the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MADEP) add nitroglycerine to their MCP reporting list. Status: Nitroglycerine is currently on the Massachusetts Contingency Plan Oil and Hazardous Material List with a Reporting Quantity of 5 lbs and a Reporting Concentration of 0.5 mg/l (ppm) in groundwater (RCGW1) and a Reporting Concentration of 50 mg/kg (ppm) in soil (RCS1).   If the intent of the request was to add nitroglycerine to the MCP Method 1 Cleanup standards, please be advised that nitroglycerine is not currently on the list of compounds under consideration for a change or establishment of a Method 1 standard for promulgation in spring, 2001.  However, a Method 1 cleanup standard for nitroglycerine is being considered for future MCP revisions and MADEP may establish an interim standard for nitroglycerine in the near term.

   Mr. Murphy said, "There is a long written response, does anybody have any, want to comment on that? OK, Joe…"

   LTC Knott said, "I just think it was well written."

   Mr. Murphy said, "Well written reply. Jim."

   Mr. Hugus said, "I also asked that MADEP raise their standards across the board in the MCP for levels of explosives in soil. That is not reflected in the action item. But I say it for the record."

   Mr. Pinaud said, "I think you’ve made that clear to Millie Garcia-Surette and I think she’s responded to you saying she has brought it to the attention to senior management within DEP and they are actively trying to do that."

   Mr. Murphy said, "OK, number four…"

4. MADEP agreed to measure the distance from the firing ranges to Greenway road. Status: On December 20, 2000, MADEP measured the distance from the firing positions at Ranges O and P to Greenway Road.  Ranges O and P are the ranges closest to Greenway Road and the direction of fire is to the west or into the Impact Area (away from Greenway Road).  At the O Range, the distance from the firing positions to the western edge of Greenway Road is 210 feet.  At the P Range, the distance from the firing positions to the western edge of Greenway Road is 410 feet.

   Mr. Murphy said, "There’s a status update on that. Any comment on that? OK, number five…"

5. Mr. Hugus requested that future IART agendas be revised to allow more time to discuss Action items as a separate agenda item. Status: the IART agenda format has been revised so that the action items are discussed as a separate agenda item.

   Mr. Murphy said, "That’s what we are currently doing. Number six…"

6. The Impact Area Groundwater Study Program (IAGWSP) office will inquire whether or not the USACE has funding to support IART citizen members at Technical meetings. Status: The Guard has asked the Corps to investigate a technical assistance contract, to enhance the assistance IART citizen members currently receive from TOSC.

   Mr. Murphy said, "Do you want to say anything to that Darrell? Joe?"

   LTC Knott said, "The bottom line is that we have asked the Corps to do that and we would like to take the opportunity tonight to ask for a citizen volunteer on the IART to help them in that process. Not to get into too much terminology again, but the scope of work, ask the Corps, see what we can do to investigate some kind of technical assistance to help the TOSC. Obviously, the TOSC is doing a great job, but we have some limitations with the TOSC so the citizens would like more than just the TOSC. So we ask that as we pursue this avenue to try to get the citizens some assistance, and we make sure that as we go out we know that package, that scope of work, that the citizens want to make sure this contractor has. So we’re hoping we can ask for a volunteer tonight to work with Darrell and the Corps: on here’s what the citizens would like, the qualifications etc…"

   Mr. Schlesinger said, "I took it on before. I’ll be happy to jump to the task providing I get some cooperation from the rest of you guys. Joel, Tom, everyone else here."

   Mr. Murphy said, "Sounds like you are it. Number seven…"
   

7. Tetra Tech agreed to provide a map that illustrates all current and future investigation areas for the Munitions Survey. Status: Tetra Tech will provide this map at the meeting as part of their Munitions Update handout.

   Mr. Murphy said, "Some maps are going to be provided tonight. Dr. Feigenbaum requests number eight…"

8. The USACE will provide the IART a listing of their relevant UXO experience including, but not limited to, quantity and types of UXO, locations, and disposal mechanisms. Status: In response to his request, a comprehensive report is provided in the IART mailing.

   Mr. Murphy said, "That was provided in the mailing. Number nine…"

9. The USACE will report an ASR Update at the February IART. Status: The USACE will present the ASR update at the February IART meeting.

   Mr. Murphy said, "That is still going to happen. And the following are on the agenda."

10. The following item will be included on the January 2001 IART agenda:

• AMEC (formerly known as Ogden) will include the Northwest corner Summary of Investigations in their presentation Status: The Northwest Corner Summary of Investigations will be discussed as an agenda item under "Other Issues"

Mr. Murphy said, "OK, that is the action items. Moving on to the Demo 1 Groundwater Report."

LTC Knott said, "Draft…"

Mr. Murphy said, "Draft Groundwater Report, Thank you. And Darrell is going to introduce it, and then Marc will…"

Mr. Deleppo said, "Yeah, I just wanted to say before Marc got started is that the draft Groundwater Report, and the topic of Marc’s discussion about identifying contaminants of concern is something that we want your feedback on. We’ve asked that the regulators respond back by the eighth of February, and if we’d like to take your verbal comments tonight on it and also try to keep that eighth of February time frame to keep the project moving along. And Tina Dolen at the Groundwater Office is going to be the collector of these comments. But again, tonight verbal comments are absolutely acceptable."

Mr. Murphy said, "Does Tina want them by email, or how does she want to receive them?"

Ms. Dolen said, "I’ll receive them voice mail or email which is Tina.Dolen@MA.NGB.ARMY.MIL, so thank you, I’ll look forward to hearing from you."

Mr. Murphy said, "You want to comment on it before it gets going, Peter?"

Mr. Schlesinger said, "Oh, well, are you asking for the comments now or after the presentation?"

Mr. Murphy said, "After the presentation."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "OK, that’s fine."

Mr. Murphy said, "You are very anxious down there."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "I just don’t want to have to email to respond to it."

Agenda Item #3. Demo 1 draft Groundwater Report - AMEC

Mr. Grant said, "OK, our presentation is on the Demo 1 Groundwater Report. There is a handout that you have that has the word slides; it also has at the end of the handout the map that will be showing during presentation. Just to put this report in context, this is one of several documents that are coming out on Demo 1 in the next couple of months.

Demo 1 was divided into soil and groundwater operable units. The purpose being to allow them to perceive separately into sight characterization and feasibility studies so that everything can go a little bit more quickly. So, this groundwater report is the first report out, it’s a site characterization report. Basically, it is describing what we found and where we found it, what seems to be the problems and any additional data needs. That’s going to be followed up with a Groundwater FS screening report, abbreviated here ‘FSSR’ actually coming out next week which is very quickly and we are overlapping site characterization and feasibility study quite a bit in order to compress schedule here. And basically what we did is back in early December; we issued a contaminants of concern identification document, which set the stage for completing both the Groundwater Report and the Groundwater FSSR. And we got agency comment and input on that COC report, and once we got that we started finalizing both the site characterization and feasibility study parts of those reports.

The soil reports both for site characterization and FS are a little bit behind the groundwater, that’s owing to a later characterization effort, there’s additional information coming in later, on soil. So, those will be coming out in March for the site characterization report and April for the FS report.

What we are going to do briefly is to update the types of contaminants, where they are located, the COC’s which we need to look at for evaluation remedies, and identifying any additional data needs, and the next couple of slides are going to cover each one of these three bullets.

In terms of nature and extent of contamination, this is not a surprise, but there is a site update with new information about the latest wells we put in. The RDX plume extends about 3500 feet west of Demo Area 1 and is about 400 feet wide. The latest wells that we put in are at MW-114, 129 and 139. And what we are drawing here are different concentrations of RDX in the Plume, the outermost concentration being anything above detection limit but less than health advisory. The lighter orange being between health advisory and 100ppb. And the brown being the most concentrated, above 100ppb.

This color report also identifies plumes for other contaminants aside from RDX, and there’s other figures in the reports that address those, but RDX is basically the one to be worried about or looking at. The other explosive plumes occur inside the RDX plume, the other explosives aren’t as mobile as RDX either because of transport properties of because they break down more quickly, so those are contained within the RDX plume, they do not extend as far as the RDX. The last point here is that perchlorate has recently been detected and it appears to be basically in the same area that we have the RDX plume.

We’ve added perchlorate as a groundwater analyte starting in August this past year, and when we found some initial detects of perchlorate in the Demo 1 area, we expanded the numbers of wells that were being sampled for perchlorate to include all the wells in the plume area. Recently we obtained the additional perchlorate information, which suggests that the most concentrated levels of perchlorate are up here, towards the front end of the RDX plume. There is a fairly low level here at MW-139, which was cleanup RDX but has about 8ppb of perchlorate. As we mentioned in last meeting there is not a federal drinking water standard this time for perchlorate. There are the numbers that California uses for drinking water criteria, which are 18ppb, and also as Todd mentioned last time there’s an effort under way to propose a federal standard of around 32ppb."

Mr. Borci said, "Marc, I actually heard today that it might actually be 18 or lower, so…and 18 is also, Region 9 has a PRG ‘Preliminary Remediation Goal’ and that’s 18ppb also."

Mr. Grant said, "OK. So the level we are seeing out in front at 139 is a little bit below the 18. And then we have much higher levels here in the plume, in the RDX plume, these data are not validated yet, but these are in the order of a couple hundred ppb in here for perchlorate."

Mr. Zanis said, "Marc, can I uh…"

Mr. Grant said, "Yup."

Mr. Zanis said, "Back in the beginning when we talked about all the chemicals of concern that we are looking for; and I talked about rocket fuels and all this…how did this get left behind? Perchlorates – when we know they’re out there in groundwater, they are a problem. What happened to that?"

Mr. Grant said, "I’m not sure what the history of…"

Mr. Borci said, "I mean, perchlorate is something that, that most…it started out in California because there is a significant number of rocket plants and most municipalities are going to be testing for it next year in water supplies. But it has only come about as a contaminant of concern at a lot of sites recently and when it comes to open detonation; open burn areas like Demo 1 is, its just recently, I believe there are only a couple defined perchlorate RDX plumes in the country, so…"

Mr. Zanis said, "I know, but we have discussed this three – well - how many years ago?"

Ms. Dolan said, "Paul, I just want to throw in that over a year ago we started looking at additional analytes to…we should consider and it was all documented in a…we call it a ‘PEP Analytical report’ and they started working on that over a year ago. So, it took a while to get to this point but we were thinking about it."

Mr. Grant said, "Yes, it does take a little bit of time to add the analytes and when we add the analytes, not knowing how important it was going to be the fact that we would have these detections at Demo 1; we didn’t add them for every well, we added them for a selection of wells that we thought would give us an idea of how pervasive perchlorate would be or whether it would be found at all…"

Mr. Zanis said, "I see we have to resample…our whole study could change because of this. The KD Ranges, the old rocket ranges, we might have contamination of perchlorates all over the place and don’t even know it."

Mr. Grant said, "Yes, there’s definitely some other locations. Today, we were talking in today’s tech meeting about the future places we should be looking for perchlorate; but the August sampling round did include a large number of wells that were kind of scattered throughout and included some far field wells too and the majority of those were coming up clean. The only perchlorate detects we have so far appear to be in Demo 1 and then the J-3 Range area. So, it is possible that there are things like the KD Range and we need to look at that, but it doesn’t look like a pervasive problem in terms of something that we’ve totally missed."

Mr. Zanis said, "I mean how about the old rocket ranges where that water - since perchlorates are even ahead of RDX – so some of these old rocket ranges that are so old; the perchlorates could already be way off base. They could have moved."

Mr. Borci said, "Paul, we - when we chose the first wells to look at to sample for perchlorate, we tried to cover almost all the far field wells, and they were scattered spatially over the entire base. So Demo 1 was the only area that came up. After that, after we knew that we had it at least at Demo 1, we took an even closer look and we sampled some other wells in the J Ranges and now we are taking an even closer look and we’re going to spot points exactly like you are mentioning. A lot of the rocket, three and a half inch rockets, we’ll go into any firing points, any wells that we have downgradient, I mean we are giving you a very close look right now so…"

Mr. Zanis said, "Could this account for some of the TIC’s that we are getting?"

Mr. Grant said, "Probably not. The TIC’s we generally have a good idea of the type of chemical compounds that are involved, and generally they haven’t been this kind of inorganic ion that we’re measuring with a separate test."

Mr. Zanis said, "Do we know what it breaks down to, what its daughter products are? Do we have that now so we can look for them maybe? As we sample."

Mr. Grant said, "I’m not sure what the…"

Mr. Zanis said, "Jim, do you know?"

Dr. Stahl said, ", I’d have to look it up."

Mr. Zanis said, "I think we need to know. I don’t want to drink it."

Mr. Grant said, "OK, the next one of those purposes that the report addresses is identifying contaminants of concern which we kind-of like call COC’s and the ones that are addressed are identified in the report are explosive compounds, RDX, HMX, TNT, TNT a couple of TNT breakdown products and also 2,4 DNT which is an ingredient in propellants. Those are the ones that are definitely identified. The report also mentions perchlorate as a likely COC, but at the time, they were getting the report information wasn’t coming out quite fast enough to work into the report. So at this point, it is something that we’re going to have to address in the future in terms of getting that as a COC.

There are some other compounds that were detected in groundwater in the vicinity of Demo 1 that were looked at in this groundwater report that were said not to be COC’s and the process for doing that was something that was approved by EPA. It is basically - we call it a ‘Risk Management Evaluation’ it includes – although EPA approved the process it didn’t obviously give up their right to reject any arguments that we make in following the process – in this particular report the arguments that we make are that ammonia, six metals and four organic compounds are not COC’s due to one of several risk management evaluation options, such as: comparison to background levels, look at the frequencies of detections of those compounds, whether the compounds might be an artifact of sampling analysis or some other factors. And I think this was highlighted as one of the topics that the agencies are looking for input from the review team on."

Mr. Borci said, "I just want to jump in and add to what Marc is saying is that we have a whole list of contaminants that have been detected and just because it is detected doesn’t mean that we are going to be designing remedial system; and that’s what the - when says risk management – it takes a look at; the high hit wasn’t at the source area and was outside of what we would consider the plume therefore we are not going to design a treatment system to go after something that is probably a background level. That’s what we’re talking about. We are starting to narrow down the list so that we can design – start to think about the design for the remedial system."

Mr. Murphy said, "Richard…"

Mr. Hugus said, "Yeah, you’re asking for input on the things that have been selected out. Is that correct? The contaminants of concern list?"

Mr. Borci said, "Yes. In the report it lists why ammonia isn’t a COC and…"

Mr. Hugus said, "Well, let me ask you, do you think there are certain things that should have been selected out? Should not have been selected out? I know that the Guard doesn’t feel that arsenic, thallium, dieldrin, benzene, BEHP, and antimony are concerns."

Mr. Borci said, "Right now the report, I think, is a very good report and I think the reasoning in the report is valid and the COC’s that we come up with at the end that will design the remedial system for…I agree with them. So, we haven’t formally submitted our comments, get some feedback tonight on how you folks feel and then we’ll be submitting our comments."

Mr. Grant said, "The last one of the topics addressed in the report is additional data needs. And there are a couple of things we are doing here – one is we’re continuing long-term groundwater monitoring, both for explosives and perchlorate. We do have one complete round of perchlorate data for the Demo 1 area now. Obviously we want to collect additional rounds to see if there are repeatability of results, if there’s apparent changes or trends in concentrations over time.

MW-114, 129 and 139 were the three newest wells. Again, those have been sampled just once, even for explosives, never mind perchlorate, so we would like to collect some additional data for those wells. There’s obviously always the evaluation of whether we need to put in additional wells. In this case, as we have in the past, the most likely place for those additional wells would be the leading edge of the explosive plume. Particularly if we were unsure of how the perchlorate looks in that area. Again, at this point the perchlorate data is so new we haven’t even mapped them up the way we have for RDX. So those are things we will be considering in the next weeks and months as we move forward to decide whether we need additional wells, those could be put in now in the tail end of the site characterization effort. They could be put in later if they weren’t critical to designing the solution – as the solution enters preliminary design"

Mr. Zanis said, "Marc, I think we need to find the leading edge of the RDX, the well 114- is that still over 100ppb?"

Mr. Grant said, "Yeah, 114 is 142ppb in the first sample, the first and only sample that was collected from that well. MW139 was non detect for the screened sample, however, when we profiled that location we were getting some low level RDX detections, so it looks now like 139 is right at the very leading edge and we are kind of at a spot where we are going in and out of contamination. As we continue sampling rounds at 139 we may start to notice low levels of RDX creeping in."

Mr. Zanis said, "I mean, I’d tend to think the void in between 139 and 129 could be turning more to the south, and like we said before, you still have over 100ppb past 139, just south of it, and that well 139, there’s a beam of the center part of the plume."

Mr. Grant said, "Right, as Jim mentioned we’ve been finding that this plume is moving a little bit further south than the groundwater modeling originally suggested, and that’s why we wound up with a lot of wells to the north like 33, 32 and 35…"

Mr. Zanis said, "A little off course - the time frame doesn’t figure on the length of that plume, in my mind. I’d hate to see us miss it."

Mr. Grant said, "Right. Another point of interest, MW-78 which has been clean for RDX so far has a little perchlorate in it. So again, perchlorate generally is in the same area, it may be a little bit wider or a little bit further south for some reason. So once we look at the perchlorate plume geometry, and match it up with RDX we’ll be thinking about what we need for additional wells in that area."

Mr. Zanis said, "So we definitely do, I think, we need a couple of more wells as far as south on 139 at least."

Mr. Borci said, "Yes, Paul, one of the points is that we have enough information on the characteristics of the contaminants to start going forward …that’s why the feasibility screening report…"|

Mr. Zanis said, "I understand…"

Mr. Borci continued, "Also, where the plume is we’re sort of lucky, is it Frank Perkins or Burgoyne Road – actually you can’t really see it, so we have a nice wide road that we can…"

Mr. Grant said, "Frank Perkins is right here and then you have a tank trail just inside Frank Perkins over here. So you’ve got a couple points of access over here to the west which; so far, we think are still clean."

Mr. Zanis said, "Nice place for a treatment facility."

Mr. Murphy said, "Peter, do you have some comments?"

Mr. Schlesinger said, "Yeah, I was going to bring them up later but I can’t control myself. So, first I don’t think that the lateral extent is well enough determined. I think that we don’t know that the bounds are - I mean, I just question that the amount of information we know gives us the ability to draw such a narrow plume up towards the source and question, why aren’t we looking for more of the shape of the plume from the source. I mean, we have so few wells near the source how can we say it…"

Mr. Grant said, "Well, the concentration gradients have been really sharp telling us that it does appear to be very narrow. This location is far enough away from the top of the mound so there probably isn’t a whole lot of wiggle going on, at least we are not seeing wiggle in the concentrations we’ve measured so far."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "But you are already saying that it’s moving farther south than you expected."

Mr. Grant said, "It’s right, it is…"

Mr. Schlesinger said, "So therefore you don’t have a…"

Mr. Borci said, "Peter, the five wells that go through the center, that was their purpose. And where the outer two are clean, you know, you are also looking at a map, but distance wise those are pretty tight for a well fence going the width of the plume. So, where 78, we’re going to keep an eye on that and where 129 has a hit also that’s going to be taken into account when we place further wells downgradient. But that plume shape doesn’t match what we would expect to see coming from there."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "I just question why we don’t have a well south – I can’t read the number because of my angle where I’m located in this room – but is it the single well that’s located just downgradient of the source, what well is that?"

Mr. Borci said, "Thirty-one"

Mr. Schlesinger said, "Thirty-one, I’m just questioning why there isn’t something further south than that point."

Mr. Borci said, "Because the distance between 31 and that well fence is actually pretty short and we could put another well there but you don’t necessarily - 78 gives us that information."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "I just - our folks, our colleagues from MIT constantly expressed to us the need to establish the extent more at the source than at the very end. And I’m just hoping that we would spend more time trying to find out where this stuff is coming from, remove it, instead of spending all sorts of time defining the end; and then stopping it there and letting it drain on down. It just seems bizarre."

Ms. Culligan said, "I think what is important is to identify the source because unless we remove the source, this is going to continue to seep into the groundwater. So, that’s a little bit different than identifying the plume at the source. I think as the remediation efforts go ahead and the design is going forward we can identify more closely what the plume looks like, but I would agree with the comment now that we should be thinking about; also in tangent, trying to see how to remove this from the groundwater. I think we do have enough information to go ahead with looking at schemes for remediation.

Now, the modeling effort I think, could help a little bit identifying where this is and I’ve got some comments on that but I was going to keep them for the end of the report here."

Mr. Murphy said, "Joel, did you have a…"

Dr Feigenbaum said, ", yeah, it looks like it’s a pretty intact plume, its sort of classic. And you’ve got, Peter, there is a lot of confirming information in terms of these…of the gradients of the concentration across the plume at several locations and it seems like its bounded pretty well by non-detect. So, I think this is a classic case where having a non detect contour for us to look at really helps to give confidence to the plume outline is drawn. Especially in comparison to – I don’t want to jump ahead too much – but to the detections RDX…detections in the central Impact Area, the very wide area between the non-detect and the point, the two. So I feel that…well first I want to continue to commend you for taking the trouble for giving us the non detect boundary. I think since both AFCEE and Jacobs are here they ought to take a good look at what a good job looks like and…, I think we’re ready to start talking about remediation, but. What’s it going to take to find the source, are we going to have to excavate the Demo area or what? What are we going to do? What’s the plan?"

Mr. Borci said, "That’s the next meeting. That will be the soil report. Soil report will lay the foundation to start to talk about that. The groundwater we want to get a hold on quicker because its further out and then we’re trying to track the source control right on top, right behind the groundwater control so that we don’t have a wide gap between when we start to address both; but, the soil screening report which was April 1^st?"

Mr. Grant said, "Yes. Early April, yes."

Mr. Borci said, "That’s when we start to discuss what the options are. That report would lay out a whole multitude of options and then that will be…we’ll be able to gather input and focus those down to what ultimately is."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Well, then, just informally, since the issue has been raised and is of a concern, I mean, what would we plan to do? To go in there and dig around or what?"

Mr. Borci said, "To be honest we have not even discussed it yet and I just don’t want to go off on that tangent. We could probably name about fifteen or twenty things we can do, but…"

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Because I think the point is well taken that from the shape of this it looks like is a pretty well defined, almost point, point, some object in there that’s…or…"

Mr. Borci said, "Very concentrated source."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Or another buried 1500 rounds or something is leaking here. But we certainly want to, you know, get it out of the ground otherwise you’re going to have to operate the remediation device forever."

Mr. Borci said, "The fact that we are in a hole that’s only 40 feet from the water table, its bottom is going to cause problems. But that’s why it’s going to be something that we’re going to have to discuss and deal with."

Mr. Murphy said, "OK, David, and then Richard."

Mr. Dow said, "This is David Dow. I had a question about the policy of not considering the heavy metals and four organics. Is that just for Demo 1, or is that going to be a policy applied to the other plumes? Because one of the concerns I have is if you have plumes that are in a zone of contribution, you have an off-base public water supply well, one of the new ones, I’d hate to see any of these heavy metals or organics in the water supply - even if they are sporadic."

Mr. Borci said, "It’s going to - it is strictly for Demo 1. And the reason that they eliminated most of those metals was because they were not in the source area well; or they weren’t detected enough to say that there is a plume of metals. I mean, metals are going to be in every sample, then you need to compare how high above and we all know that thallium, other metals, have been an issue, but I think the way it’s written up in the Demo 1 report is accurate and it’s not something we are going to be designing a remediation system for.

I do want to point out though, that the history of remediation systems on-base; like FS-12, I think SD-5, they - a lot of them need to have green sand filtration prior to going through any type of treatment and that’s because they need to deal with manganese and iron. And I think that the manganese and iron concentrations here may be the same, but those would tend to take care of some of the metals that we’re talking about, so…"

Mr. Dow said, "My recollection though; in the past, is that passing the stuff through the green sand filters has caused problems in the activated carbon treatment and hasn’t been an entirely successful strategy."

Mr. Borci said, "We may or may not be using activated carbon for the…that will be in the screening report that comes out in two weeks."

Mr. Dow said, "The second thing was it is true, though, that for the dieldrin and these metals that they are above the MCL levels."

Mr. Grant said, "I don’t know off hand what the single dieldrin detection…what the level was."

Mr. Borci said, "The dieldrin detection was back in the beginning of the program, we’ve only seen it once, and we’ve sampled the well at least six times. Thallium was detected at I think 3.8ppb; it was an estimated detection, the problem is the detection limit is right around what the health base number is, so you have to consider that…"

Mr. Dow said, "The final thing was it’s my understanding that EPA’s in the process of revising downward their arsenic MCL, is that going to cause the arsenic detections to be below the new proposed standard?"

Mr. Borci said, "Arsenic is spilling from 15ppb to ten. And I believe that there were no detections for arsenic in this plume above ten."

Mr. Dow said, "Thank you."

Mr. Murphy said, "Richard and then Tom."

Mr. Hugus said, "I had a quick question about this dashed line. Marc, does that indicate that you’re not sure about the boundary?"

Mr. Grant said, "Yes."

Mr. Hugus said, "And, so I mentioned, is there wells going in to give you confidence?"

Mr. Grant said, "That’s the most likely area that we’d focus on."

Mr. Hugus said, "OK. I’m not sure what the right point to give comments to EPA about the contaminants of concern document. Is this it? Or you want - when Marc is done?"

Mr. Borci said, "Whenever you’d like…"

Mr. Hugus said, "Well, I’d like to echo the comments David Dow just made, and add to them that I think that MCL’s rather than risk management should be our basis for deciding what is and what isn’t of concern."

Mr. Borci said, "What the order requires is that things are cleaned up to background. So that’s why one of the other agenda items – it’s for soils, but, the overall issue that we need to kind of…"

Mr. Hugus said, "But I’d make the same comment about backgrounds. I’m prepared to make the same comment after looking at that book. That rather than - when you establish background levels you have the problem of whether the place you went to that you thought was clean, was actually clean. And that there’s some doubts about that. So, it’s the same issue with background levels. If a contaminant is above the MCL, it should be something we worry about. Not whether its above background, because we are not sure about background; and the same is true for these contaminants in Demo area 1. Also I would definitely add perchlorate to the COC list, there is no question about that."

Mr. Murphy said, "Tom, you have a comment?"

Mr. Cambareri said, "Yeah, I just want to support what Paul was saying about trying to define the toe of this plume. It’s conceivable if you just project the core of that plume that you can get right by 139. , so, haven’t seen, you know, some pretty narrow petrolium plumes and MTB plumes and how they behave across Cape Cod sand and gravel aquifer; it just seems…you know that’s something that you want to…follow through on. So definitely some more wells are needed down there.

And then also I think it’s instructive in what you said that that projection of this plume appears to be maybe twenty degrees off what the groundwater model predicted. And I think the groundwater model is a great tool, has some good accuracy, but as it was being used prior to plot precise well locations, we need to be, I think this has proven that – it puts you in a ballpark - but its not precise. So, as we go forward with other investigations in this area we need to keep that in mind, that it is just a tool to use in this investigation. It doesn’t give all the answers.

And I noticed in the draft report there was a number of water table contours. I didn’t have time to look at flow paths from that, but were those flow paths more in line with what you saw here?"

Mr. Grant said, "I’m not sure, it was such a slight gradient I don’t think there was any huge difference from the plume shape."

Mr. Cambareri said, "I would imagine if one plotted it back you could get that projection rather than another one though. I would assume - it is always good to get the draft reports for the team so that we can be advised as of what’s going on. I hope we continue to get the draft reports through this effort depending on whether it’s a Guard contract or it’s a Corps of Engineer contracter; that draft reports will continue to be made available to the team."

Mr. Murphy said, "We had Joel, then Jim, then Jan."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Yeah, I’d agree if there was a weakness in the depiction it would be that maybe we’re missing one toe well down there - is there any plans to put at least another one? One would go a long ways I think; because we’ve got the target drawn on the wall here and so if we put the dart into it we know what we’d be looking for, so is there some plan there?"

Mr. Borci said, "That’s part of the recommendations that’s going to come out of the review of this report. So I think clearly what we’re hearing tonight, yes there will be additional wells at the toe of the plume."

Mr. Murphy said, "Jim..."

Dr. Stahl said, "I just have a couple of comments. One- I agree with Trish’s comment that we have to go after the source and I’m sure we will. And I think that that’s very well at least we have indirect evidence, if we look at the table on page fifteen of the groundwater report it is a table that shows the explosive residual…the amount of RDX, HMX and dinitrotolulene underneath some sources found on a soil surface for subconisance versus a random grid sampling. And you can see that the concentration of RDX in the random sample is about 1.2ppm, and they only found nine out of eighty-four samples containing sample. But underneath places where they found contamination, twenty-eight out of thirty had RDX and the average concentration was 540ppm, so that’s about five hundred times more. Really, when we get to the soil it seems to be prudent to go after…we’ve got to find the sources of the contamination. You’ve got a maximum concentration of 1.4 percent RDX in one of those contaminations that they found; and so it won’t take very many of those to contaminate the water and continue to contaminate the water."

Mr. Murphy said, "Jan."

Ms. Drake said, "To follow up on what Tom brought up, actually I am half way through the review of this document and one of our comments was - had to do with the figures. It doesn’t site the source of mortar level data and I was wondering whether you did all surface - shallow wells - an average of elevations or what the vertical gradients were. And perhaps that might have something to do with the trajectory of the plume. And I agree with the group here, that we also are going to be recommending additional wells for better plume definition. So, can you answer the first question from here?"

Mr. Grant said, "I can’t - I know they are all relatively shallow, the plume depth is only fifty or sixty feet so I’m guessing there wouldn’t be any significant vertical gradients over those depths. And most of these wells have a screen pretty close to the water table so we’re probably using that top one for definition."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "Quick question, Marc, how much time would it take to get from the RDX to the Demo 1 to the groundwater?"

Mr. Grant said, "That’s not a quick question."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "OK, based on our knowledge of doing this elsewhere."

Mr. Borci said, "It’s almost a comparison that you can’t make. I mean - you want to make a guess."

Mr. Grant said, "Well, I think the water, to get from ground surface to water table is a year or less, a couple of years maybe. But the RDX is such an unknown at this point because it takes a while to dissolve in precipitation before it makes that move."

Mr. Borci said, "And that’s what some of the fate and transport studies going on that AMEC is conducting, and that’s one of the answers that we’re hoping to get. We’ll have that answer hopefully before we get to the design. But we’ll have probably wells in the ground that say; yes- that’s what the plume looks like, or no - it's longer. Before we even get to that point, I mean its going to be all part of the decision process leading up to the remedy."

Mr. Grant said, "Perchlorate, by the way, is typically much faster, so there’s not that ‘long time to dissolve’ get into the solution."

Ms. Culligan said, "Can I follow up on that then? Because it's related to the comments that I wanted to make about the modeling. It says in figure 7.1 of this report the modeling is actually being completed, yet I’ve seen nothing that has given us any information about how that model development went on, how it’s actually being validated, what perameters were determined. And if you look at page 12 the things that this model is going to be used to do it are going to be pretty extensive. Looking – the basic point that Peter raised, how long does it take for the contamination to get to the groundwater – are decisions going to be made about cleanup of soil on the site based on that groundwater remediation schemes are going to be developed based on that; could you comment on what state the models actually have? And when were we going to see output from that? That we can comment on because that seems crucial to the groundwater efforts at this time."

Mr. Grant said, "At this point, most of the studies that we’ve had conducted at the University of Texas to get input parameters for the model are complete and we’re starting to develop the unsaturated zone model, but it’s not very far along in terms of providing that for discussion to the agencies or to the group."

Ms. Culligan asked, "Are we able to see the reports from the University of Texas?"

Mr. Grant said, "That is something that we issue a monthly progress report on which goes to maybe just the technical team."

Ms. Culligan said, "And related to the unsaturated zone modeling, we’ve attended some of the technical meetings and I just want to voice again my concern about validation for that model because the last update we had there wasn’t any program in place to take samples from the unsaturated zone to basically validate that that model was a reasonable model."

Mr. Borci said, "I think what we can do is get you the latest. Catch you up with the monthly reports, and then we can probably either meet separately or further discuss those comments after you have a chance to look at those to see if the answers are contained in those reports."

Mr. Hugus asked, "Can you make that an action item so that we can hear back about whether our technical advisors got the information they needed at the next meeting."

Mr. Murphy said, "OK. Mark, you got a wrap-up slide there?"

Mr. Grant said, "I do. In terms of the next steps for groundwater, This is a little bit if a repeat of the second slide; but, again we’ve got this FS screening report which we started finishing as soon as we got comments from the agencies on the contaminants of concern. That is coming out next week. And like most of these reports there is a three-week window allowed for agency input on these reports. We’ll be conducting Treatability studies for remedial technologies that might work for groundwater at Demo 1 and that’s going to be starting, I believe, in late February or early March and continuing on through early July. And the next step after that, once we know, or we think we know what works is to conduct the feasibility study to evaluate the remedies that might work. And that’s the draft of that…looks like the end of September timeframe for this year.

Once the draft goes through the review comment process and gets to a final…the last then is…well…not the last step…the first step in completing the remedy is to select it. And there’s this public process where we recommend a remedy out of the final FS and the EPA attempts to develop consensus among the stakeholders for remedy. And that whole process is described in the FS workplan, it’s not described in detail in this report. Except for Demo 1."

Mr. Murphy asked, "OK, any additional comments on Demo 1? Go ahead Peter."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "I got up the lateral extent…I don’t feel that we’ve defined the plume. I feel that the plume is too…what we defined this far out great, its not long enough. I don’t think it’s adequate. I think there’s a…if you look at the Figure 2-11 I think it was…and there’s another one in figure 4-6, you can’t tell in the one in 4-6, but the one 2-11 that Marc had up on the screen a moment ago, you could see that the…there was a - I mean it’s not that one. There’s one that shows the concentrations along the plume, I guess you could see it on that one to some degree…there is a pulse. It seems like there’s a strong pulse of RDX at the source. It seems to die in the middle. There’s a pulse at the end, and we know it dissipates from the information we know. We don’t know how far it goes down, it could go right back up again. Maybe it is not a trend, but it very well could be, so I thing that we haven’t established enough information to say that we know that this is where it is."

Mr. Borci said, "Do you have more? Because I was going to say more wells…I get that…and then I think what we can do besides incorporating those comments into the revision of this report but maybe have an action item that at the next meeting we can say when we think ballpark- we might be able to be out there installing some additional wells. Does that sound…"

Mr. Schlesinger said, "Great, yes, please. The other comment is more of a general one and I brought up a number of times before and it seems to be corroborated by the summary of the first sixteen interviews that were sent out, but you take a multi-source contamination and make it into a point source investigation and this document here which were are probably going to talk about elsewhere in the meeting shows that there are things that have been all over the place. You know, we are just assuming that we’ve done it Demo 1 and down there in the hull, , I just hope that we’re going to expand our search a little bit beyond the narrow limit of what we consider to be this one simple line in this plume. I’m guessing that if this thing veers to the, and Paul agrees, to the south."

Mr. Murphy said, "OK, any more comments on, uh, Demo 1?"

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Just of the time scale, as long as some people are not really satisfied about the depiction of the plume, when do you think we are going to get a couple of more wells in there?"

Mr. Borci said, "We are going to have to go and talk to the Guard; but, I mean, everyone knows it was on the plate before we even heard it tonight so…we’ve had discussions with the Guard that required some more wells out here, they’ve said, ‘we realize that,’ and now it is just a matter of how soon in fitting it in with the other well installations that are going on around the base."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Why, we wouldn’t do something like go into a design phase and then try to fill data gaps after we’re into the design phase?"

Mr. Borci said, "I think we’ll have the wells in the ground much before then."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Because there are certain other folks operating in the area that like to do things the other way; they like to design systems before they have the remedial investigation complete. I’m glad to hear that we’re not going to do it that way."

Mr. Murphy said, "Jim, comment? Joe, could you get that mike down there?"

Dr. Stahl said, "Yeah, I have a question about the…there is a whole number of technologies listed out on the feasibility study work plan and you said that that is all going to be finalized by February. Are all of these being investigated? Or some of these? Or…"

Mr. Borci said, "That is what the February report will contain, which ones look like they have promise towards the site and that document will be able to be commented on."

Dr. Stahl said, "So the actual work on the..."

Mr. Borci said, "It is far from finalized."

Dr. Stahl continued, "Not going to start until after the February…"

Mr. Grant asked, " In terms of treatability study work?"

Dr. Stahl said, "Right"

Mr. Grant said, "Right. That FS Screening report will be the precursor to treatability studies."

Mr. Borci said, "There are some ‘in general’ treatability studies that the Guard has going, and they may be discussed in this…I mean, I don’t know what is going to be in the screening report to that level of detail, but they are probably going to have to e additional treatability studies so…"

Dr. Stahl said, "OK, Thank you."

Agenda Item #4. Investigations Update – AMEC

Mr. Murphy said, "OK I think we are ready to move on to the Investigations Update. Darrell, I think you wanted to say something again…I just want to remind people that we’re going to stop at eight, or at some place as close to eight as we can depending on where we are, for that hearing."

Mr. Deleppo said, "Just to…again to remind folks that we’re looking for the feedback on this previous presentation on the Contaminants of Concern for the Groundwater Report by the eighth of February, though we’ve got quite a few tonight. And then , just to kick off Marc’s next presentation: There’s another situation where we are looking for your input, and that’s on the Soil Background Calculations. Again, we are looking for feedback by the second of February on those and Mark will go through that at this point. First, he is going to talk about the J Range and off-post explosive detections and response plan to that. And also he is going to talk more about the ah, upcoming documents that are coming our way."

Mr. Hugus said, "Darrell, you consider that the verbal comments we made here about the COC’s to be comments, right? OK."

Mr. Grant said, "The Impact Area Groundwater Study update is … again we have handouts that have the word slides, at the back of the handouts are maps, that will be presented. The other thing that we will provide to the IART members at the table, which is not a public handout, is the detection maps. Each one of these maps, there are five different ones; for five sets, I should say, that go with different analytes. Each one has a set of tables at the end that list all the detected analytes both validated and non validated; it is just the beginning of the study. So again, these are provided to the IART each time we meet in order to keep track of where we have detections in the different analyte groups.

As we usually do, we first cover the latest well installations, and in this case we have got one additional well in the Impact Area, which is the last one for a while that we are going to put in, it is MW-141 and is here between the inner and outer transects of the Impact Area. There is one more response well to be put in, P-30. I think we mentioned last time it is a little bit too close to the UXO exclusion zone for the HUTA. So we have to hold off on that for a little bit longer until we get a window of a couple of weeks at least where we can install that well.

So, 141 was installed in December, there were; ah, oh, I should mention that as long as I have this figure up, this is the latest RDX extent map for the Impact Area, showing it is at Demo 1, we’re showing a couple of different levels of contamination, in this case just anything above detection and anything above 2 ppb there are not that much higher levels of contamination that you would see at Demo 1.

The shapes of these extents have changed very slightly since our last meeting. I believe the biggest change is down here that’s MW-135, where we had – I’m not sure last time if we even had a profile detect there, but now we have a monitoring well detect of RDX. The detection is at such a depth that is appears to be coming from a location far back beyond the CS-19 which is in this area, probably more towards the center of the Impact Area. So, that MW-135 does not appear to be related to CS-19 so much as the Impact Area itself. There are some minor changes up here to the North in the vicinity of MW-97."

Ms. Drake said, "Marc, can you describe why the separation between 135 and 108/110 to the North…"

Mr. Murphy said, "Jan, could you just repeat that so we can..."

Ms. Drake said, "Yes, I asked Marc to describe why the separation between the little blob to the North of 135 which is 108 or 110. Different depths or what?"

Mr. Grant said, "I believe the depths are actually similar but 110 came up clean and 108 did not so we are drawing the little blob around 108 and using 110 as the boundary for it."

Mr. Zanis said, "But shouldn’t that little blob go back to the Central Impact Area?"

Mr. Grant said, ", actually it doesn’t because it is not deep enough, and that answers your question about whether it is at the same depth, , if it was deep enough we would draw it further back but in this case it is probably just a shallow detect at 108. I don’t know what the depth is off hand, but that is usually why we pick the length of something like this is based on how far you would sort of back-track the area or the source."

Mr. Zanis said, "No kidding, that doesn’t go back to the Central Impact Area. So you are saying that the source is outside the Impact Area."

Mr. Grant said, "I believe that is right."

Mr. Zanis said, "And the same with the other 20 or what’s up there with the dark…"

Mr. Grant said, "Twenty-three…"

Mr. Zanis said, "It is the same for that, it is way outside the Impact Area?"

Mr. Grant said, "Actually 23 does have a very deep component, I think the reason we are not drawing it back is because we are taking it half way to 43 which is on the same sort of particle tract. So 43 does not have a level above 2ppb, it has a level below. And it looks like the level above, that we see at 23 is coming from this area but it has to stop somewhere before it gets to 43."

Mr. Zanis said, "Unless the particle tract is wrong once again…and it is going between and…all that stuff all over."

Mr. Grant said, "It is possible… right…yep…"

Mr. Zanis said, "OK."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "What would…what’s the , concentration…the highest concentration at MW-23?"

Mr. Grant said, "Twenty-three is…I’m going to say around 4 or 5…"

Mr. Zanis asked, "Has the helicopter flown that area?"

Mr. Grant confirmed, "Six point six" to Dr. Feigenbaum.

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Six point six, now when you drew this little baby plume down there, around MW-23, certainly there must be some other wells in there."

Mr. Grant asked, "At 23?"

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Did you just…did you draw that little plume on the basis of just well…"

Mr. Grant said, "We’re using results for 23, 124 and 51 in this area."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Oh, Twenty three…."

Mr. Grant said, "124 is just the next well to the south and 51 is the next well to the north."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Oh, I see."

Mr. Grant said, "So it is an arbitrary decision about how far this extends…we normally say half way to the next clean well."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "It’s…yeah…No, but back upgradient, how do you determine…"

Mr. Grant said, "Oh, that too is, you know, without wells in this area we have to say maybe it goes half way from 23 to 43 but it is not above 2 here, it is above 2 here; so you have got to guess at how far that goes."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Well, it looks like you’ve got a fairly well defined question there about indication…about where to put another couple of wells."

Mr. Grant said, "If it becomes important to look at concentrations that finely, but it is levels around 2 ppb so it’s not a whole lot of changes there."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Well, that one is at six though."

Mr. Grant said, "Yes, at 23 it is at six."

Mr. Borci said, "Joel, I think your comment, at least from my part, is noted that at the end of February, February 28^th is the Impact Area Groundwater Report; which is going to come out. It is going to go through all the hits, makes some evaluations and then propose additional work; and I think your comment would be a comment on that, so…"

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Thank you."

Mr. Murphy said, "Paul, did you have a question?"

Mr. Zanis said, "Yes, wouldn’t that be a good prospect for the helicopter to fly and see if there is anomolies over there? "

Mr. Borci said, "Right, and I think that is one of the things that we can consider, I mean we are looking at site history, aerial photographs, and then any other technology that we can use to our advantage."

Mr. Zanis asked, "But it hasn’t been flown yet?"

Mr. Borci answered, "It has not. We’re awaiting data on the second round of airborne magnetometry, and that should be in early February. Based on that we’ll probably have to go out and make some evaluations of how useful it was and then we could propose additional, but in the meantime, you know, we still take a look at the histories and that is something that the groundwater report might touch on."

Mr. Zanis said, "That would be nice if you flew that track theoretically and found a hot spot, went there and found source, remove it, then the…"

Mr. Borci said, "You have to keep in mind that this is a nice pretty picture on a map and it’s very rough rugged terrain out there, we are talking very large areas it’s…you know…"

Mr. Murphy said, "Let’s see if we can, if we can let Marc try to run through as much as he can because we are going to have to stop the meeting, or pause it at eight o’clock, so……"

Mr. Cambareri said, "Can I have a clarification on…

Mr. Murphy said, "OK, sorry Tom, I didn’t see you…"

Mr. Cambareri continued, "Number ninety-six, was that shallow or deep?"

Mr. Grant said, "I don’t know off-hand. I’m guessing it was somewhat deep, because we’d connect to the back. Again; that was the latest extent of RDX including the last response well, at least for now, in the Impact Area. …additional wells we have installed in the J Ranges are shown on the next two figures. These are unnumbered figures in your package, but they also appear – these are the figures we use in the weekly progress reports - this one figure that shows the total base with inset A for the Coast Guard, and inset B for FS-12, J Range area. And if you go to inset B, - is it A and B - which is the eight and a half by eleven map; you can see some of the recent wells we have done in the J ranges. Many of them are along Greenway road – recall in the J-3 Range area which is here. We were setting up a fence of downgradient walls along Greenway; ground flow direction being to the southeast, or south-southeast. So, the recent ones we’ve completed here are…include 142, 143, 144, 145, 148 and 146 – I forget where that is – also we installed 140 downgradient from the L Range which is just over here, just to the east of J-3. We are continuing to install wells in this area, there’s a few more green dots that we haven’t done yet……those green dots on this inset B map, and the overall map…and we’ll be continuing to install those in the next couple of months.

We’ll also be starting on Phase IIb locations in actually about the next week we’re set up to do inactive demo sites. Beginning about next week, if you turn back to the second figure, these little green dots that are kind of scattered around, they are not in the J Range area, not in the Impact Area and those are the Phase IIb wells. So you’ve got wells out here at the Gravity Range, proposed for Demo 2, proposed for inactive Demo sites, K Range, things like that. Those are going to start to get underway and should be completed by about the end of March. That’s it for well installations."

Mr. Hugus said, "May I ask, Marc…did , on inset B you mentioned new RDX detections, you went through it kind of quickly, could you show where they are again?"

Mr. Grant said, "Yeah, we’re going to do a couple of slides – both word slides and maps on the latest groundwater detects for RDX."

Mr. Hugus said, "Later?"

Mr. Grant said, "Yup, about three slides down."

Mr. Hugus said, "All right."

Mr. Grant said, "The next slide is our usual update on groundwater sampling status and we keep ‘raising the bar’ so to speak, we put…six rounds up this time, we completed the December long term monitoring round, which was the sixth round for the oldest wells and the fifth or fourth founds for the younger wells. The Impact Area response was a little bit unusual, there are so many of them we’ve installed them over such a long period of time that they range between one and three rounds, I just depicted them in here as having two rounds at this point."

Mr. Grant continued, "OK, so…Groundwater Sampling Results…with this slide you may also want to refer to the fourth map in your handout which is from the J-1-3-L Range work plan. There are several new detections of explosives in groundwater. At the J-2 Range we have a well, MW-130 which is up here at the very end, close to the Impact Area it is in Disposal Area 2 and we had detects there of RDX, HMX and a TNT breakdown product, 4-amino-DNT."

A voice that was picked up by a microphone said, "what level?"

Mr. Grant answered, "The levels were fairly below health advisory, about less than 1ppb. …these are all at the water table and the soil in this area has both propellant related compounds and a TNT breakdown product; not the same one, but a different one so it looks like we are probably getting these low level hits from Disposal Area 2 itself, whatever source materials are located there. That’s the one new hit on the J-2 Range."

Mr. Zanis said, "Marc, could it be that’s all just left there? And then it has already traveled down?

Mr. Grant said, "It could be, yes."

Mr. Zanis said, "So are we going to put any more wells in the chaff site because that is a zone of contribution, I think of the new water supply well three."

Mr. Grant said, "That is the subject of another document, that is the J-2 additional delineation work plan which is designed to determine whether we know enough about J-2. We’re kind of doing all this stuff real quick, but we haven’t written the J-2 Range report yet so you haven’t missed that. But we are trying to figure out already whether we know enough about J-2 to anticipate the next steps in terms of well installations."

Mr. Zanis said, "I mean, I know from the 16 interviewees; I mean when I was a kid the J-2 Range was the place to go. But I never imagined that there was so much disposal going on there."

Mr. Grant said, "Right, and that’s something that we are looking at right now…they do…"

Mr. Zanis said, "The water people should be very concerned about reading these interviews and realizing what is upgradient of their wells."

Mr. Grant said, "OK. The additional delineation work plan should be out to the entire review team within the next couple of days, I believe the agencies got their comments in the last day or two."

Mr. Murphy said, "Jan, you have a comment."

Ms. Drake said, "I don’t mean to interrupt, but I wanted you to look at the figure 2, the FS-12 area wells ETR System are, I think that the water table flows over the other side of the mound with well 132, at least according to current understanding of groundwater flow; so it’s not flowing in a direction of the new water supply wells, it’s flowing towards the J-3 Wetlands Snake Pond area."

Mr. Zanis said, "I don’t confer with that. I’ve already…I’ve seen the…"

Mr. Murphy said, "We just…"

Mr. Zanis continued, "I’ve seen the hand drawing zones of contribution that the JPO has drawn and it comes right from there."

Mr. Grant said, "I think we are talking about 130, right? Is that…on the J-2..."

Mr. Zanis said, "Yeah…yeah."

Mr. Grant continued, "You were talking about 132 Jan…You were talking about 132…"

Ms. Drake said, "I’m sorry, I thought you were talking about…"

Mr. Grant said, "Yeah, we were talking about 130…"

Mr. Zanis said, "On the other side of the mound…"

"I beg your pardon," Ms. Drake said, "I’m sorry."

Mr. Zanis said, "OK"

Mr. Grant said, "OK…so that’s the latest detect at 130. At the J-1 Range we have got RDX and HMX detected at MW-136 which was installed…the biggest thing here is the 1,000 meter target, but this one particular well was installed in the vicinity of the burn kettle which was also an area where wastewater from the J-3 Range Melt Pour building was disposed. So, there is a lot of stuff going on here, but in this particular well again we had some sort-of low level detects, the levels are around 1ppb, little bit less detected at the water table so; again, it looks like that is coming from that immediate vicinity. The last new detect at the J Range is one I want to mention at the J-3 Range and that is MW-132. We had non explosives here, which…we actually have profile samples previously – but Perchlorate this time detected at MW-132 - and the concentration is…again we are not showing any of these numbers because it is not validated data yet, but it is a little bit less than 40ppb. So it appears to be well over the numbers that are being kicked around by California and by potential federal drinking water criteria…"

Mr. Zanis said, "Now, will that water head towards the FS-12 water…."

Mr. Grant said, "That water is heading towards FS-12, right."

Mr. Zanis said, "But well 136, is that kind of vague where that’s heading or is that heading out into the Impact Area?"

Mr. Grant said, "136 is pretty close to the top of the mound. The top of the mound is around 127 in this area. So it’s…ya know…that was the top of the mound at the time we happened to measure it. There’s probably some oscillation going on where the top is kind of moving around here, so depending upon where the top is, any particular year, 136 could be flowing out this way, or maybe this way, it is probably never going to go towards the southeast, but…."

Mr. Zanis asked, "Could it go towards the east though, towards our new supply wells?"

Mr. Grant said, "It is really hard to say we just don’t know enough about how much the top moves around yet."

Mr. Zanis said, "But it’s out there, I guess we got to find it, are we going to do something about it?"

Mr. Grant said, "well…again, this is the first phase investigation for the J-1 Range, so some of what we did for J-2 came up with some additional delineation work plan will do the same thing for J-1. Actually where there are still some other wells on J-1 we need to still install, but there will be some follow on work there."

A microphone picked up a voice that said, "Marc, are we going to mention MW-13?"

Mr. Grant said, "…I did not mention MW-13, just because at the time I prepared this we hadn’t really talked about it in the tech team. It is a new Perchlorate detection."

Mr. Zanis asked, "Where is it?"

Mr. Grant said, "MW-13 is just to the north west side of J-3 Range, and in this area groundwater is probably, usually flowing to the west or maybe south west. But this was a deep detection and most likely source would be back in here towards the top of the mound in the J-1 Range area."

Mr. Zanis said, "Boy, they tested a lot of rockets over there so it’s a…who knows where are that Perchlorate is going."

Mr. Murphy said, "OK, Marc, maybe we could stop before you get to the next slide…Richard you want to make…"

Mr. Hugus said, "Yeah, I know you are trying to finish but…do…"

Mr. Murphy said, "We will get back to it…regardless…"

Mr. Hugus continued, "Do you have some kind of an estimate about the J-Range Plume yet? Do you have any…any overhead of… to that effect?"

Mr. Grant said, "We haven’t tried to outline it and this series of wells along Greenway Road boundary will help us quite a bit on that. We are just now to the point where we are starting to look at cross-section views and trying to figure out…you know we’ve got a bunch of detects that we’re trying to figure out what depths things are at, trying to match them up. , there is probably a bunch of different plumes that will eventually be drawn there. It doesn’t look like one big hunk and thing that’s all got the same source."

Mr. Hugus said, "Well, I’d like to see some kind of conceptualization here because the whole thing is so confusing as a bunch of separate detects right now."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Marc, can I just get a preview of coming attractions, , Robert Gill, told me that you had a hit of RDX and EDB at … somewhere along the root of the pipeline…is that, are you going to report on that later?"

Mr. Hugus said, "I have another question…"

Mr. Grant said, "Unfortunately, I wasn’t including the EDB results in this report, but was going to talk about all the RDX, HMX hits in that area. That’s the last…"

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Are you familiar with the well…"

Mr. Grant said, "Yes, yes."

Mr. Zanis said, "What well is it Marc?"

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Could you mention that when we come back?

Mr. Grant said, "Ahhh…Yep."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "If you could just gather your data?"

Mr. Grant said, "OK."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Thank you."

Mr. Murphy said, "OK we’re going to pause and have this ah…a public hearing on the , EPA Administrative Order number Four. …and what I was…uh…the way we are going to proceed is Margery Adams of EPA will essentially give an introduction explaining the order. …we would then like to have an informal period where people can ask questions and……Margery will try to answer them and then we will start the hearing and people can offer formal comments and those won’t be responded to tonight. So…any questions on that…procedure? No? OK, so…and we have a court reporter to take all the comments tonight."

Agenda Item #5. Administrative Order #4- Public Hearing

The public hearing commenced. Dictated by court reporter.

Agenda Item #4. Investigations Update Continued. - AMEC

Mr. Murphy said, "And not it is time to get back to the not quite as formal meeting. So, Marc you are going to resume? It now being 9:50 p.m. I just had a question as to ah…how we want to proceed. We have Marc…8:50 p.m. - there we go, I guess I’m in…I paid a lot for these glasses…OK it’s now 8:50. We have Marc’s another one and a half presentations. , then we have followed by the Status of Small Arms Range Air and Sampling Soil, and then the Other Issues. So…uh…can I get some feedback as to how we want to proceed? We just want to continue through the agenda?"

Mr. Borci said, "If you could fly through the rest of your stuff so that we can get to the small arms and then we can re-evaluate at that point."

Mr. Murphy said, "Sounds good."

Mr. Grant said, "OK, so at this point in the groundwater results we had just talked about the recent detection, the J Ranges again a couple of low-level detects in source areas on J-2 and J-1 for explosives and it looks like Perchlorate at a source area in J-3.

The next part of the Groundwater Update is to talk about new detects off-post. And there is a figure, it is actually labeled Figure 2 but it is the fifth figure at the end of your handouts, that shows some wells in the FS-12 area along with water table contour lines and groundwater model particle tracts. Roughly perpendicular to the contour lines. Just one thing to note here, in best of all possible worlds you would have your groundwater flow going exactly perpendicular to your water table contour lines. It is not obviously the case in all portions of this figure. Again, that is because we’ve got a set of reality base measurements which is a water table at a certain point in time that is contrasting with the steady state model which is designed to look at more of an average condition of what’s going on, so there is some disagreement I think in terms of what the fine points in the groundwater flow direction might be; although generally you can see that we are saying in both cases that it is coming from the J-3 Range down into the north end of Snake Pond.

The significant detect is that we have for the first time RDX and HMX detected in 90 MW-54 which is down here a bit further west of our previous detections. Remember we’ve had detections in the vicinity of J-3 Wetland or what is also called the Camp Good News bog, 54 is a bit southwest of there and if we look at groundwater flow paths, the source of this detection is probably more to the west of the J-3 Range than J-3 Range proper. It looks like the J-3 Range was more related to previous detections, this detection is a bit off to the west, although again, is possible to…if you follow your line perpendicular to your contours that you’ll come into the J-3 Range, so it may be just a fine point.

Also we have a couple of profile detects, we collected split samples from some borings that AFCEE was installing at the north end of Snake Pond identified as 101A and 102A, and those detects of RDX and HMX also backtrack to this recent detect of 54. I should mention that 54 was sampled about 3-4 times previous to this detect with no detects in the well, so it looks like maybe RDX is just entering this area for the first time, at 54, again we are seeing it at 101 and 102 a bit further south. These levels are in the vicinity of 1 – 6 ppb in the profile samples in the monitoring well.

The other significant thing we want to point out in terms of new results is that we’ve got all these new wells, they are actually shown as light blue wells here, and there is kind of a mixture of existing names and proposed names but we’ve got 142, 143, 144 and 145 up here, with a bunch of profile detections. Again we’ve installed well screens but we don’t have--- wetland, but it is starting to give us a sense for how broad the area of contamination might be along greenway road. And Joel had asked about the EDB, we saw a couple of detects in EDB in the profile samples that AFCEE had split with us and analyzed from MW144 in this area. So we are starting again to draw a better picture of what’s coming through from the J-1-3-L-Ranges right here, area, into the North end of Snake Pond.

And the last part of this update, just let me go to this one it may answer a few questions in terms of what we are doing about it. We’ve got a new response plan underway. We’ve actually submitted a draft to EPA just after the 1^st of the year, and we’re expecting to provide a final response plan to them tomorrow. It talks about additional sampling, we’ve got about 19 monitoring well locations identified under the plan, and we actually have already started sampling those monitoring wells, those are shown as wells proposed to be sampled in dark blue on this particular figure. Those are being added in, they have never been sampled previously and that will be sampled for explosives.

There is also a couple of wells that are supposed to be installed, …in this response plan we have identified two locations, SP2 and SP1 down here at the North end of Snake Pond that will help us get a better feel of where contaminants may go as they enter this area. And I should point out that aside from what the response plan talks about, we are still installing wells along Greenway road that were intended to give us our first pass at J and L Ranges. There is all this activity going on in tandem, the response plan to address these recent detections of RDX and then the original site characterization in this area, it looks possible that we may be moving some of the original proposed well locations around in order to get a better sense for where the contamination resides, particularly around the south end of the Greenway Road area. And that’s pretty much what I have on the off-post detects."

Mr. Zanis asked, "Marc, have you tested for perchlorates?"

Mr. Grant said, " That is part of the response plan, we have not for many of these wells…we did get a perchlorate detection up at 132 I mentioned, and that has prompted some additional sampling downgradient of 132. We should have results of that in the next month or so, but at this point we have very few data."

Mr. Zanis said, "There is a lot of wells already over there but there not screened at the right levels, are we going to bather testing those anyway? Or are we going with new?"

Mr. Grant said, "No, there’s some wells that are at the right levels and what we’ve got here obviously, is an FS-12 release that’s a little bit different than our RDX, HMX release, so it’s cross-gradient a little bit, but the depths are not too bad in many instances and we are using many of the FS-12 wells. There could come a point after we get this next round of samples out of the nineteen or so locations and actually more than 30 different screens because some of them we’re taking samples, AFCEE has some extraction wells, or re-injection wells I guess, that are turned off right now, but they have a 60 foot screen, we are taking samples every 10 feet, kind of like a profile situation, so we’ve got a better sense at the end of that sampling, as to whether we need additional wells in that area. But we are seeing both from the…this particular detection came about because of a long-term monitoring plan, it was just routing monitoring of a well that never showed detections previously but it was an area of detect so we were interested in it. We’re getting detections in the LTM plan, we’re getting a lot of detections in our first pass at the J- Ranges, so its all kind of pointing towards additional work to define plumes in this area. We are at the point now where we can’t really draw lines around things and try to circle them up, but we are getting to that stage, we’re starting to look at all how the detects piece together."

Mr. Zanis said, "This is like a whole huge separate problem, especially if the treatment system…"

Mr. Grant said, "Yeah, yeah, it’s a very interesting area. Because you’ve got the treatment system going, you’ve got…your close to the top of the water table so you’ve got the mound kind of shifting around, probably blurring things around a little-bit making it tough for us to see exactly what the source areas are."

Somebody spoke in the background. Mr. Grant said, "Got the what?" That person repeated what they said but it was inaudible.

Mr. Grant said, "You’ve got the pond where groundwater is probably discharging and going…."

Mr. Zanis said, "I mean…with this…you’ve gone this far. And I…you have a lot of experience now of what’s going on here. How’s it going to be for a new contractor to come in and take over this study? I mean, I think it is almost undoable. They are going to have to read all this data, they’re going to have to get caught up. What’s it going to take, two years to catch up? To this process…of what’s going on here? Is the Corps of Engineers…Do they fully understand that?"

Mr. Grant said, "I think, you know, most of what we are doing now for us has become standard anyway, we are putting the data out to a lot of folks, I don’t think there is a whole lot of mysteries about how to do this type of investigation. I’d like to say we’re unique in doing something like this…."

Mr. Zanis asked. "So your company is not keeping some of your knowledge to yourself? You’re sharing it with everybody?"

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Make it proprietary, proprietary."

Mr. Grant said, "Well we are sharing it with the Guard and eventually it is going out to the public, the Agencies and the Public so there is no secrets there. We can’t really keep something to ourselves if the Guard is paying for it, so…"

Ms. Dolan said, "Mark, you indicated before the hearing that this response plan had been sent out to the Team? Did you say that?"

Mr. Grant said, No, I didn’t…and actually this response plan has not been sent out to the team. I’m not sure if that has been done in the past, but the response plan we provided to the agencies on the second was just to EPA, MADEP and the Corps."

Ms. Dolan said, "OK I would suggest that after we get the final plan tomorrow it be distributed to the team, and should they have any comments to send them to me."

Mr. Grant said, "You mean after there is agreement on the final plan or as the…"

A voice was picked up from the PA system that said, "because you are agreeing and we get to comment…"

Mr. Borci said, "This is obviously an ongoing process so, we are constantly re-evaluating which wells we are going to be sampling, so, yes."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "Mark, I’ve got 2 quick questions. The FS-12 fence, is it likely to capture these…"

Mr. Grant said, "Probably not the further west ones, like around 54, it looks like AFCEE is modifying their extraction, to pulling things in this area, but I think the revised extraction zone, if I am not incorrect, falls just short of the recent RDX detect."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "The other part is regarding Perchlorate. , actually it is two parts. One is, …will FS-12 fence clean Perchlorate? Number one, and two on Perchlorate is, I understand that you are going to test some priority locations for Perchlorate but don’t forget we tested areas of civilian land, citizen, residential land around Snake Pond and we probably should think about that as well if there is anybody drinking water over there. I just don’t want us to forget about it."

Mr. Grant said, "OK."

Mr. Hugus said, "Mark, you just told us that…ah…I think the team should pay special attention to what you’ve just told us…a whole rash of new detections of RDX have been found, and I just want to review those, you said that the new detections its 143, 144, 145, 045 and 101A and B?"

Mr. Grant said, "OK, …yeah, some are new and some are not. These are pretty close together and I think you might be able to say this is all sort of related. You’ve got the detected 54 which is in a well screen and then you’ve got detects in 101 and 102 which are from profile samples and it all appears to be following along this general path, and then we’ve got, what I’m thinking, is not so much new detects, but better delineation of an existing groundwater contamination problem here from the J-3 Range, so we already knew that RDX and HMX was coming down from the 90MW22 area, through the south end of Snake Pond where AFCEE installed those dry points that we got splits on. Now we are just getting better information about – it is a little bit wider than we knew previously, and we are saying the same kind of HMX situation up here as we saw previously, so its, I think this western thing is a significant new find, but this is just better delineation of what we knew."

Mr. Hugus said, "Well, I asked you earlier about…I commented about the need for some kind of picture conception of what’s going on here so we don’t have to juggle all of these separate detections in our heads. Is there something about these detections and their level in the groundwater that makes you think that they are all separate, and not coherent, or…"

Mr. Grant said, "Not at all. In fact the way the water table mound shifts around you know, you’re probably – it could all be from a single source and they’re just getting smeared around. I don’t think there is any resistance to us trying to delineate plumes here if we can, it’s just the fact that we are just getting data now and we’re trying to work through it as we get it. You’re getting those as fast as we are so we are not to that stage yet."

Mr. Hugus asked, "Well, I think we have as much information in the Central Impact Area, Area. Where you have drawn plume shells, so once again I’d urge the regulators and the Guard to provide that to us, so we have a picture of what’s going on. And finally, you said that the L-Range might be a possible source area?"

Mr. Grant said, "L-Range is just to the east of J-3 Range and it appears if anything it is a possible source related to the RDX that goes through 90WT13 or pass through because I think the well is relatively clean now and follows this path into the extraction system."

Mr. Hugus asked, "And what about on the other side, to the left? West of J-3"

Mr. Grant said, "I’m not sure that there is any obvious source area in this location, again backtracks are a little bit fuzzier here because the top of the mound issue and you might just as easily draw a perpendicular line through all of these that swings right back into J-3."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Marc, that was part of the question I wanted to ask you, about these particle tracts; they are not perpendicular to the contours. They are not even close."

Mr. Grant said, "Right, what we are looking at is a snapshot in time of the water table with the contours and then the steady state groundwater flow model that’s picking out some set of average conditions that don’t necessarily apply to our recent measurements."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "I don’t understand that. You’ll have to break that down for me a little bit."

Mr. Grant said, "I think the model is trying to pick sort of an average case and that average isn’t well represented by our recent measurements. So, maybe if you looked at a longer term thing you might say that the groundwater would flow in these paths, but if you look at how its flowing last month when we took these measurements, it is slightly different. It could be because of pumping changes but I think because the water table is very flat here it is probably shifting around a little bit, oscillating…"

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Wait a minute, so you’re saying that particle tracts are at time averages over what’s known about the gradient?"

Mr. Grant said, "My understanding, maybe we are getting beyond my knowledge of modeling at this point, is that the groundwater flow model is set up to represent some average set of conditions, it’s not calibrated to December 2000…"

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "But these…the contour lines represent a snapshot?"

Mr. Grant said, "Yes, that represents our measurements last month."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Well, it’s kind of…it’s a little bit confusing. And …"

Mr. Grant said, "That’s why we’re saying keep the particle tracts in this area as sort of a fuzzy indication of things, we feel a lot more confident in an area like Demo 1 that’s away from the top of the mound that’s not going to swing around, but in this area it could swing quite a bit."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Because unfortunately, you are providing the most recent data about the Snake Pond area in terms of not only potential explosive contamination but also EDB contamination. And you draw these particle tracts a little differently and you get some of your material going down to the west side of the pond, not on the east side of the pond and that is a critical difference in terms of the containment system. Do you follow what I’m saying?"

Mr. Grant said, "Yes, I follow what you’re saying."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "It would be nice to get a little better understanding of this because sometimes we get told by AFCEE folks that nothing possibly could be going on the western side of the pond given their particle track extrapolations, but if there’s two sets of data we’re keeping two books here, so it’s a little confusing."

Mr. Grant said, "The best sense of what is really happening is partly obtained by water table measurements and one of the things the Response Plan that we propose doing is collecting a bigger synoptic set than this last set, this last set was based mostly on wells, as you can see, on post and to the North and the next set would like to go a little bit further south."

Mr. Murphy said, "Ray, do you have a question, Ray Taylor?"

Mr. Taylor said, "No, I think he answered that he doesn’t believe that pumping is causing that convergence there."

Mr. Grant said, "This particular set of flow passes with the pumping system on, so you get a different set of tracts if you switch the system off."

Mr. Taylor said, "So you are saying pumping has something to do with convergence."

Mr. Grant said, "Pumping is probably producing these kind of situations where this is, you know, circling in. With the pumping system off I think the tracks will generally go straight south in this area."

Mr. Cambareri said, "I just want to say on that the water table fluctuates so wildly over time in this area the fluctuation seasonally could be 6 feet more or approaching record lows now…"

Mr. Grant said, "…over years…"

Mr. Cambareri said, "Over you know, 30 years a period of records, so there are these slight changes and if you have water table information I think the key thing would be to just plot the map, the flow lines from the water table information."

Mr. Grant said, "Right, and that gives you your present case rather than your sort of average case. Yes."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Because those determinations are crucial for thinking about the future of this whole system."

Mr. Murphy said, "Peter, go ahead."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "Marc, if we don’t know whether FS-12 came clean perchlorate, can we make it an action item to find out?"

Mr. Grant said, "If FS-12 can clean perchlorate? …I think the short answer is granule activated carbon is not effective for perchlorate."

Someone said, "Is not."

Mr. Grant said, "So you’d have to combine it with another system. But again at this point we don’t have an indication that it is going into the system; it is something we are trying to investigate. That’s it for the Groundwater Update part. I was going to shift gears to Soil Background."

Mr. Murphy said, "Yeah, we’ll see if we can get through this as much as possible without question just so we can try to make up some time, unless you really need to ask a question. You can ask afterwards, certainly."

Mr. Grant said, "I kept this part of the presentation fairly concise and simple because I have difficulty explaining all the statistics myself. So this first slide just talks about why we are interested in soil background. Background is something that defines the so-called natural site conditions. In this case what we are talking about is conditions in the absence of military use of the site. Obviously defining background is critical to noting whether there is an impact or release. So, if you know what background is and you know that there is a level above background then there has been some sort of impact. If not then it doesn’t look like there has been an impact.

Now, how background is determined gets a little more complicated. Basically what we are doing is measuring these levels of these analytes. Each analyte probably has its own background level at least for certain analytes. Many analytes, such as explosives, would have no background, or background would be non-detect. But what we do then after we collect these measurements is we have to combine them somehow because if we take something that may be naturally occurring in soil, say potassium, we are going to wind up with a range of different values and we need to represent that somehow statistically and reach an agreement upon what – if we make a measurement of a particular area, whether that measurement is consistent with the background value for potassium. So that’s what all these statistical generations involve is trying to figure out how to represent the data to come up with an agreement on background.

Some analytes are naturally occurring, mostly inorganic compounds. There is also some man made compounds that we think have background levels, and those are basically from non-military sources such as pesticides that would be used for mosquito control. Relatively few but a few of those.

OK, the background tech memo, it’s a rather daunting couple of inches thick and it was recently released, I think it was the first week in January. I don’t think the text is that daunting, there is only about 20 pages of text describing what we did and the results we wound up with. There are additional tables that summarize those results, but the text itself I think you can get through without too much trouble. Most of this is just back up showing the statistics and how we came about some of the evaluations and distributions and outliers and things like that.

What we would end up doing, we had about over 200 different analytes in this study, and we were proposing background levels for about 44 of those. And 29 of those are inorganic parameters, another 11 are semi-volatile organic compounds, generally these are combustion by-products and they have anthropogenic sources such as aerial deposition from combustion, or combustion of vegetation due to burning. And then another 3 pesticides and one is herbicide, and again we believe these can have anthropogenic sources. Those 44 comprise the total number of analytes for which we’re evaluating background. All the other analytes we will assume that background is zero, or ND.

For these 44 what we did is we took a very large soil set, basically we had hundreds of samples, we talked a little about this last meeting, both on-post and off-post soil samples. Then what we did is we looked at graphical and statistical analysis to make sure that the off post samples we were using were not representative of a release. So we were looking to see if there are any trends or differences that suggest that a particular group of samples we collected on-site were impacted by a release versus not being impacted. If they do not appear to be impacted then we can include them in what we call background. We are trying to get as big of a data set as possible because the bigger the data the more confidence we have in what the levels are.

In term of results what we wound up with is pretty consistent with previous studies. Those studies include Phase I. You may recall that in July 1998 the completion of a work report we came out with something we called "Proposed Background". IRP has a background set that they use under the Risk Assessment Handbook and MADEP has non-urban background levels that they use. So, in this document in one of the tables we compare these new background levels that we came up with all those other background levels and there really aren’t too many differences. So, that is good in terms of consistency.

I guess what we’re looking for, at this point, is input from stakeholders on how to proceed with this. Just to reinforce; background is something that is critical for us in order to determine what are the COC’s or the Contaminants of Concern. If we don’t know what background is then we don’t know if a particular measurement is something that represents an impact and has to be potentially remediated or if it is just a natural site condition. So, I’m afraid that we’re kind of under a time-crunch because we’re trying to get the COC’s determined as fast as possible so we can proceed towards remedies, but there is a sign-post along the way that says ‘what is background?’ and we’re kind of there now and we need to get the input on that."

Mr. Murphy said, "Ready for the questions before you go with the other one?"

Mr. Grant said, "Yes."

Mr. Murphy said, "OK. Richard."

Mr. Hugus said, "Well, you are asking for input Marc, and I appreciate that, but this book isn’t something that the layperson can read and provide input on. It is just not written for people outside of the business to understand. Could you for instance, tell me what …ah…well, let me put it this way. My understanding is that when you find a background level, you say that level is acceptable; i.e., it’s OK because it is background, is it alright to say that?"

Mr. Grant said, "Yes, basically. If we come up with a level that everybody agrees is background then that is a level; if you have measured that level someplace like at Demo 1, that means it is OK, you do not have to do remediation on that."

Mr. Hugus said, "But you have been elsewhere outside the base to places you think are clean and found background levels there. As I said earlier, there is all kinds of room for confounding when you do that. For instance, if pesticides were used in an area where you thought was clean, you have a false background."

Mr. Grant said, "Right, and what you are getting at is the idea that we don’t have a huge off-post data set, we do have all these on post samples and what we do is try to include as many of the on-post samples as possible. So the threat is that you will include some on-post samples that had a military impact. What we are doing in the statistical analysis is looking at trends to see if there is a break in the distribution of data: that may look like a set of data represents natural conditions, and then there is a higher level that represents some sort of possible releases; and that is what we are doing in the out lying analysis and looks at distributions."

Mr. Hugus said, "Well, can you tell me; for example, what background level for MCPP is?"

Mr. Grant said, ", give me a sec, I think I…"

Mr. Hugus interrupted and said, "What level of MCPP that it is that the Guard thinks is acceptable."

Mr. Grant said, "Again, we only had 3 pesticides and one herbicide…"

Mr. Borci said, " MCPA is a related herbicide and …"

Mr. Murphy interrupted and said, "Excuse me; Mrs. Crocker, I just wanted to address something you brought up during the hearing since I saw that you were leaving. You had said that you didn’t know how to apply for membership on the team…"

Mrs. Crocker said, "No, I don’t think it was me…"

Mr. Murphy said, "OK, well, I just wanted to put it out there the way the team, the team has been set up by EPA members. The only additional members since the original one I think was Peter Schlesinger who followed the procedure of writing a letter to EPA requesting membership on the team. It is then evaluated by EPA and talked about by the team and that is the process, just so you know."

Mrs. Crocker said, "Well, it would be nice that you could advertise that through me."

Mr. Murphy said, "OK, I just wanted to get that to you before you left."

Mrs. Crocker said, "I’ll try to help advertise that, thank you."

Mr. Murphy said, "Thanks."

Mrs. Crocker said, "Thank you, Jim."

Mr. Grant said, "Did we not answer that…"

Mr. Hugus said, "Take MCPA, what is the acceptable background for it?"

Mr. Borci said, "I think, ‘what is the proposed background’ is the key."

Mr. Hugus said, "OK, proposed, see."

Mr. Grant said, "…don’t agree. The proposed level from the current document is 20,000 ppb. There was also in our Phase I report a proposal for MCPA, that was 48,000 ppb."

Mr. Hugus asked, "So which is it?"

Mr. Grant said, "This is 20,000."

Mr. Hugus said, "You are saying that it is OK if 20,000 ppb are found in soil?"

Mr. Grant said, "We are saying that our analysis indicates that level as background. It is not a level that resulted from military use of MCPA, it is a level that you could find any place on the Cape."

Mr. Hugus asked, "And what level was it when God created the earth?"

Mr. Grant said, "I wasn’t there."

Mr. Hugus said, "You know everything though, don’t you?"

Mr. Grant said, "It was probably zero."

Mr. Hugus said, "OK, my point is that the whole business of background level is subject to confounding and error and my comment as a stakeholder, which you asked for, is that we should not be caught up in background levels in order to decide what is clean and what isn’t. We should base that decision on maximum contaminant levels. That way we avoid the problem of confounding with off-site sources or sites that may be contaminated themselves. And that has to do with…. I picked MCPA because I knew you were going to give me a high figure. 20,000 ppb in soil is not clean. I wouldn’t want my children to play in soil that had those levels; I mean, it is just not acceptable. And I am sure there is others, but I can’t really understand this book."

Mr. Grant said, "There really are only 4 pesticides and herbicides that are proposed, the rest are either semi volatiles or inorganic compounds, so, I agree, those 4 are going to be something that will probably generate the most comment.

Mr. Borci said, "I think I just want to clarify one thing that you said, Richard, when you said maximum contaminant levels are you referring to state cleanup standards? The way the order is written is that it has to be below background levels. There is a minimum level of protection and whatever outstanding clean up numbers are out there, these levels would have to be below those…"

Mr. Hugus said, "Well, take this for example, suppose that we, ah, were taking trichloroethylene as a background, trying to establish a background level…"

Mr. Borci said, "Background is non-detect."

Mr. Hugus asked, "What?"

Mr. Borci said, "Background in non-detect for TCE"

Mr. Hugus said, "Not if you go test where the BOMARC plume is."

Mr. Borci said, "That is one of the things of our study, that is one of the things that Marc was saying is that we just flat out eliminated that right off the bat and said any TCE is….."

Mr. Hugus interrupted and said, "I know, I know, I’m just trying to give you an example of why the whole business of establishing background is subject to fault. If you are already in a contaminated area, you are not establishing clean standards. You know, and I just don’t want that done here. There are levels that you guys are going to say are acceptable that aren’t acceptable."

Mr. Dow introduced himself and said, "I guess the concern I have is the general presumption is that if you have a point source that leads to a plume, that can tell you the area is contaminated, but seeing it is quite possible, especially for plumes that military activity could deal with non point sources. And if that is the case then the background, unless it is someplace far from the base, could give you an advertant viewpoint of what the actual background is, so especially for the heavy metals, maybe even some of the pesticides and herbicides, that you could have military activities that occur on the base that were non point sources rather than point sources. And when you delineate to background you should think about what the potential sources for those are, and separate them out. It makes a critical difference for things that are airborne. A lot of things are not airborne so that you can go ahead like you proceed, but other ones obviously are."

Mr. Grant said, "Yup, I think the distribution of the samples is pretty widespread. It is certainly not focused on the Impact Area, although there is a lot there, but there is a lot on the training ranges, so if your going to have this non-point thing that you are describing, it would have to be a really big non-point source in order to bias all the samples. But if you had such a source, then yes, you would not be able to see the obscurence of background. Unless you went to way off post."

Mr. Dow said, "When they used to burn all the howitzer rounds that they couldn’t fire, the mortar rounds, that could make a fairly large non-point source since the stuff is airborne."

Mr. Grant said, "Yeah, although there are going to be predominant wind direction that is going to influence that, but it will be a big one."

Mr. Murphy said, "Peter, do you have a question down there?"

Mr. Schlesinger said, "Are you done so I can ask all my questions?"

Mr. Grant said, "Yes."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "OK I’ll start at the beginning and please bear with me because I did make an attempt to go through this whole thing. First, on page 3, in the second paragraph of 2.1.1 under Phase 1 methodology, I don’t understand...I mean, I do understand the issue of the, criterion that was used, the 71 percent criterion. I understand it is not known in Phase I why it was used. But instead you chose to increase it by upping the number of detections to 20 detections as a means of determining whether or not an analyte stayed in the batch that you were going to calculate background for or not, and I didn’t find this explanation clear enough that I could understand why this was plausible. I just want to follow that up by saying I did go back into your chart, into your tables, pages 29, 30 and so on… and found that pentachlorophenyl and dicamba were kicked out or eliminated from your consideration because of that criterion. And I wanted to ask a question of whether any of the substances removed because of that detection level have high values of concentration."

Mr. Grant said, "So you are asking if things that were kicked out for low frequency of detect had elevated…"

Mr. Schlesinger said, "See, right now you are kicking things out because they didn’t exist…their frequency was low, but..."

Mr. Grant said, "Kicking out analytes…"

Mr. Schlesinger said, "Kicking out analytes from the background concentration because you didn’t find them very often, but that doesn’t assess as to whether they were high or not."

Mr. Grant said, "No, and this is not intended to be sort of a broad characterization of site soils and trying to identify hot spots, it is really just focused on background, that sort of evaluation of whether something exceeds background, whether there is a hot spot in any particular area, is done in a site characterization for that area. So, for instance, the gun and mortar positions, we would look and see if there was any exceedences for that particular analyte that we kicked out; if there were any high levels, and if there were; we would say these are a concern, and then we would go to background, not have one. Then we would say that that analyte is a contaminant of concern, and then we would have to consider it in the FS process."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "OK, I didn’t know, I’m glad you cleared that up. I know you just talked a little bit with David about the issue of heavy metals, but I didn’t find them dealt with very well – there are a couple of sections on metals – but I didn’t find that anything regarding the heavier metals that I was looking for in this document. Maybe I missed it, but I thought I covered it pretty carefully. On the issue of MCPA, page 15, last statement on the page is a confusing statement. It says ‘the finding that MCPA concentrations off site are similar to and in many cases higher than concentrations on-site suggests that MCPA in soil is not attributed to improper use during military training activities and represents anthropogenic background conditions’ I think that is in totally unwarranted because we don’t have information that says how that MCPA got to that location: ‘the areas we have chosen for off-site in Phase I investigation are right on the fringe of the base’, yes they are right just over the current Route 6, but before route 6 and many, many years ago, when all sorts of...…training was going on, route 6 wasn’t there. There was all sorts of movement of people back and forth …"

Mr. Grant said, "OK so you are saying that we saw a good comparison…source…"

Mr. Schlesinger spoke over Mr. Grant saying, "we…we...the...the…to say that the fact MCP there is not attributed to improper use, remote training activities…is just not --we don’t have enough information to say that."

Mr. Grant said, "OK"

Mr. Schlesinger said, "It may be true, but we don’t have the information to say that. On page 17 - I dealt with that answer - on page 17, ‘eleven SVOCs were omitted from the evaluation’ and it said that, "look at the graphical analysis in Appendix A-6 ‘to show that these are distinct from the remaining lower concentrations’ well I would have had to rip this book all apart in order to see, to actually check that. Because the…you can’t look at them all they are all on different pages. You put two on a page or something like that or three on a page, so you can’t actually compare it to verify that the statement is actually correct. It may be right but I can’t see that. I have to go all the way back. I am assuming you are talking about the graphical representation in the back that shows some little squares and…it is a little hard to find, you go into there … see what I mean?"

Mr. Grant said, "Yes."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "The point may be true but I can’t make it. I can’t see that it is correct. Two other ones, Oh, I wrote them down here…one of them I think I already dealt with…Oh, , on the page that talks about metals. Table 3-2 the last page, page 31, ‘Cyanide was removed due to low number of detections’ I was wondering, does Cyanide occur naturally?"

Mr. Ray Taylor said, "In peach pits, almonds, it does in some instances."

Mr. Murphy said, "Do we have peach trees and almond trees on the base?"

Mr. Taylor said, "I am just giving you an example."

Mr. Murphy said, "Oh, alright. Could we have a… are you set Peter?"

Mr. Schlesinger said, "Yes, but we kicked that out and I was just wondering why we kicked that out, if it is a low detection thing…"

Mr. Borci said, "Kicking it out means if we see it anywhere it will become a contaminant of concern."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "OK well if I find anything more here I’ll let you know…"

Mr. Grant said, "Again, the fact we have background for 44 means that for 156 or more background in ND or in certain cases has yet to be determined."

Mr. Murphy said, "For those people who have not really gone through this thing, it is really just a small amount of text and a lot of data and calculations…"

Mr. Grant said, "And a few good tables."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "And the tables at the end, but unless you are going to go through and re-calculate like I did in Phase 1 all the calculations, it is not that big a deal.

Mr. Murphy said, "Thanks Peter, COL Murphy."

COL Murphy said, "Yes, Sir, I would just like to note that we are well behind and respectfully ask that possibly if you could reorder, we have some important issues yet to cover, and to see if possibly you could reorder the schedule for the meeting and lets see if we can get the meeting somewhere near the tract that was planned in the original agenda. Thank you."

Mr. Murphy said, "Thank you. Is that uh… any more questions for Marc on this? We have…"

Mr. Borci said, "If anyone has any other comments, they can be emailed to me, email is ‘borci.todd@epa.gov’ and also my phone number should be around somewhere for the office in Boston. And we can go over this stuff. This is going to be an ongoing process, we are trying to get some type of resolution now, so any input and time that Peter put in is appreciated, and everyone else that did it also, so thank you."

Mr. Murphy said, "Thanks Marc. COL Murphy makes an accurate point that we are significantly behind an hour and twenty minutes or so. We still have on the agenda the Status on the Small Arms Range and Soil Sampling, and then under Other Issues we have; ASR Interviews, the Northwest Summary of Investigations, Richard asked that we talk about fact sheets and maps, and then to wrap up the schedule, so, do we want to proceed with the next item and possibly not cover the other ones? The next one is the Status on Small Arms Range and Soil Sampling, I think it is going to take a while, so would that be fine to go on with that one and leave the other ones until a future meeting?"

Mr. Hugus said, "Not with me, sorry."

Mr. Murphy asked, "What are you interested in Richard, of the remaining…"

Mr. Hugus said, "I would like to discuss shortly the ASR Interviews and the two things I wanted to mention, the map and fact sheet. The map and fact sheet aren’t going to take long. I can do that in like three or four minutes."

Mr. Borci asked, "Would folks be OK with putting Small Arms off until the next meeting?"

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Well…"

Mr. Borci said, "That’s the call, I guess, because we can cover that and Tom Cambareri also had something about Water Supply One that he wanted a quick update on that. We could cover those three issues and then call it quits, and cover Small Arms next meeting; we can do it first thing next meeting."

Mr. Hugus said, "Let me ask about that, do we have soil sample data on the Small Arms Range to present tonight?"

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Well, there is already about three pages here and we’ve already read it, or some of us have read it. Can we do just a little bit on this, or a quick?"

Mr. Schlesinger said, "We’ve read the statement from the State about the air sampling, so…"

Mr. Murphy said, "Alright, so it sounds like we just want to…"

Mr. Schlesinger said, "Can we find out if there is soil sampling data so we can at least find out some more."

Mr. Hugus said, "I also have a comment, you know, COL Murphy is complaining that this meeting is going on too long, but part of the reason is that we had a formal hearing on Administrative Order #4, if the National Guard had not appealed that order we wouldn’t have had to waste that time."

Mr. Murphy said, "We are behind nonetheless, so…you know, I’m just trying to find out how much we’re going to cover, so should we go ahead with the Small Arms and then we’ll take up what we can?"

LTC Knott asked: "What time are we quitting?"

Mr. Borci said, "Small Arms is going to take the longest; Archive Search, lets go with that, we can do Water Supply One, we’ll skip Northwest corner to the next meeting and then go on to Small Arms."

Mr. Murphy said, "OK."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "The Archive Search is going to take a while."

Mr. Murphy said, "We are trying to…ah…"

Editor’s note: People began to speak in unison – inaudible

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "While Marc is up here can I just ask a couple of questions quick, you don’t have to do a report. Is that alright?"

Editor’s note: people began to speak in unison – it was agreed that Dr. Feigenbaum could have five minutes.

Mr. Murphy said, "OK, Take it away."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "I just, not…"

Mr. Murphy interrupted, "And Joe also…what time do people want to get out of here, I think that is the bottom line."

LTC Knott said, "We are out of here at 10:00 p.m. we have the room until 10:00 p.m. To make it very clear, it is ten o’clock"

Mr. Murphy said, "That gives us 20 minutes, go ahead Joel."

Agenda Item #4. Status of Small Arms Range Air and Soil Sampling – AMEC

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Number one, is, I think it said here air had greater downwind detections greater than upwind for five metals. Those five metals were as much as I believe two orders of magnitude greater downwind than upwind so I think the study results ought to be a little more quantitative. Just to say qualitatively greater than could be one-tenth of a percent greater, but that’s not the case, it is significantly greater, there should be some adjective in there or some numbers. The other thing is, Why is it taking so long to get the soil data validated that was first introduced as invalidated data two meetings ago, in November. What’s the problem?"

Mr. Grant said, "There is a lot of data going through validation and we have to set priorities in order to keep certain reports on enforceable milestones, this was not one of the priorities. Other things such as the report on the targets, reports on J-2 Range were priorities. So this was pushed back in the validation loop"

Dr. Feigenbaum asked, "So when do you expect it will be validated?"

Mr. Grant said, "We do have the Sierra East soil and air validated, those were distributed to the Team last week. We are waiting on now, Golf and India soil."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "So they are validated but we don’t have the results? Is that right?"

Mr. Grant said, "Those are not validated yet, that is what we are waiting on."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Now wait, but there is some validated soil?"

Mr. Grant said, "Yes, Sierra East"

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "But we haven’t got the…"

Mr. Grant said, "You got them."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "When?"

Mr. Grant said, "They were sent in the mail last week."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "We just have the air."

Mr. Grant said, "That was sent first and the soil was sent actually FedEx’d with the groundwater report Friday so you should have got it earlier this week."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Oh, it is camouflaged with the other report…Oh. Could you send out another copy just in case."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "No, lets go back and check our mailing"

Mr. Zanis said, "I’ll give you mine."

Mr. Murphy said, "We are going to save two minutes on that five minute topic."

Mr. Hugus said, "Except, let me just say one thing, We have gotten the short shrift on this whole Small Arms Range report. There is no introduction to this, it just says ‘see Range Air Monitoring for the Air Monitoring Event’ We get books for everything else and when it comes to this you can’t even tell what it is about."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "That’s right"

Mr. Grant said, "It is not a report. It is just the data."

Mr. Hugus asked, "Well, why isn’t it a report though?"

Mr. Grant said, "It takes time to write reports. We have not got to this one yet, but we will."

Mr. Hugus said, "Yeah, well, I hope you’ll note the comment then."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Because you remember we’re supposed to be using this data to figure out what the following study is, and at this rate we’re grinding to a slow halt, it is kind of a acidtotic process. And also I would urge that it be put up in the importance queue, at least that is my feeling about it because after all, this is, unlike the other things, an ongoing activity. And since we now know there is up to five hundred heavy metals downwind air and some of these ranges are close to residential areas. This is possibly a real and present danger, and should be moved up in the queue"

Mr. Murphy said, "OK, so we have about 15 minutes left."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "ASR, are we going to start on those?"

Mr. Murphy said, "OK so we have less than 15 minutes left." Background and overlapping conversation.

Mr. Murphy added, "We have to end before 10:00 p.m. so…"

Mr. Borci said, "We can spend five minutes on ASR, any…"

Mr. Schlesinger said, "Let’s not start it, lets just get the - and finish this meeting."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "That’s right."

Mr. Murphy said, "OK, so Peter’s suggestion is to hold off on the Small Arms and just get the…excuse me, the ASR. We already covered the Small Arms. And do the map and fact sheet."

Mr. Hugus said, "All right."

Mr. Hugus said, "What I have put up here is a map that Paul Zanis made which shows what we have been asking for. I notice the Joint Program Office (JPO) isn’t here tonight, we have been asking the JPO for five months now to provide a map which shows all the contamination at Mass Military Reservation, so far the only maps that are up for popular distribution are the ones that show only IRP sites. And since the JPO hasn’t fulfilled their promise to add the Camp Edwards National Guard Bureau sites, Paul went ahead and did it himself. If the Guard can’t come up with a map we are going to ask you to distribute this one. And if you can’t distribute it, tell us why. Tell us what the problems are I think that you’ve probably got a copy by now and if not Paul can get you one. , we need a map and the reason is that there is a lot of misinformation out there about exactly how much contamination there is in Camp Edwards. Some of the people have been going to the meetings and saying that Camp Edwards is pristine and if the Guard hadn’t kept it so clean we wouldn’t have future water supplies. It just is not true, a lot of it. All the work that we have done over the past three and a half years in mapping contamination has not been represented to the public in a way for them to understand it or with easily available information. Along the same lines I feel we need a fact sheet much like the one we produced as a team a couple of years ago to provide to the state legislature when it was debating a bill having to do with turning the fifteen thousand acres of Camp Edwards as a watershed protection area. The public again needs to know the facts about what we’ve discovered. A lot of those facts have been memorialized in the last Administrative Order, and I’d like to ask the team to put both or this one item on the agenda as a major item for the next meeting, that is the production of a map and fact sheet to give to the public about what we found and to make it be coherent with the existing IRP sites as this map is here. Thank you."

Mr. Schlesinger said, "I just want to say that that is a fantastic idea. And I don’t often agree with Mrs. Crocker but this is a perfect example of the public not getting access to the information in a useful manner. I’m part of the public and it is really a bummer when you can’t get a grasp of the situation in a way that it gives you a better understanding and we need to make a better effort not just to get the information to the other people outside this room but to the people on this team. We all know how much paperwork this project generates, and how many facts and how many things and some of us do this full-time for a living, and many of us don’t. So having an adequate diagram, map, whatever you want to call it, of the entire picture as a working document along with a fact sheet that adequately represents the work that we’re doing keeps us straight, and makes sure that we provide the public, ourselves and the people outside of this room with the information they need. Thanks."

Mr. Murphy said, "Paul."

Mr. Zanis said, "Yeah, the map is pretty easy, it is a diagram fact sheet and with the Order #4 you can read it and look at the map and get a good idea of with some IRP information, you can see that LF-1 is a landfill. And the black areas are soil removal, I think it is kind of nice and it gives you a good idea of what’s been happening at this base. If you think that one plume is drawn too large, well I drew them small but as we kept getting the information I had to keep making them bigger so this time I said I’d make them a little bigger yet because it is going to catch up to it. I don’t think anybody can argue that point. So, I’d like to see this distributed at the next Impact Area Review Team meeting, by the Guard over there on that table, and if not I’ll bring them. And I’ll distribute them outside the door if you don’t like it. So they are going to be out there one way or the other, I’d like to see the Guard pay for it and have them out there with the fact sheets. So let’s get it together here and start telling the people the truth, instead of telling them all this funny kind of information that is really stretching reality quite a bit.

Mr. Murphy said, "OK, we have about two minutes…"

Mr. Borci said, "Just on that as an Action Item we can check with JPO and see what the status of the map is."

Mr. Murphy said, "Richard, you had your fact sheet item?"

Mr. Hugus said, "Actually I don’t want to wait another month for the JPO to respond to this request, no, what I want is for us to come up with our own map and fact sheet, for people to bring their suggestions to the next – draft fact sheets to the next meeting."

Mr. Murphy said, "Tina"

Ms. Dolen introduced herself and said, "I’m glad that you did bring that up because I did want to mention that at the start or actually before the next meeting, the Community Involvement team including EPA and MADEP and ourselves are going to host an open house that will start at 4:30 pm, at the Holiday Inn on the twenty-seventh if that is the date that you said in fact, and if that place is agreeable to you, and one of the purposes is to get information from the public to find out what exactly is wanted and to provide as much information as we can to the public about what the Groundwater Study Team has been doing and to use it as a good exchange of information with the support of EPA and MADEP, so I hope that you will be available to participate in that exchange. And with respect to the map and JPO, I think I did hear last night at the Senior Management Board meeting, that that map is in the final drafting stage and it has had comments and that I’d encourage you to check with Jan and she can give you that information."

Mr. Murphy said, "Thanks Tina."

Mr. Zanis said, "I’ve heard it too many times about to make it palatable to the citizens, the military likes to treat the citizens like we are stupid so they give you a map with no information on it like the SMB a couple of meetings back about the water supply wells, they had a map on the wall with nothing on it. It was pretty much blank. And I think this is good example…I’m going to make sure that that map is in the schools, that the kids have them, parents have them, everybody’s got them, so whether you like it or not, JPO, the map is going to be out there. I’d like us, as a team to give that the approval. It is pretty darn accurate; all the sites are up there. There is more tank targets than listed, so if anything I’m a little conservative and I think it is a good informational tool. It shows the base for what it is and that is what it is right there."

Mr. Murphy said, "Thanks Paul, we’re going to have to end so we can get out of the room…"

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Just one more on this…There is really good institutional grounds on having a joint Plume depiction because really, in fact now, for one of the crucial plumes FS-12, the IART is actually providing the money for the wells. So that they split samples now for the study of FS-12, that’s why Paul has that red overlap at FS-12. And it is just intellectually necessary to see these things together because in fact more and more the two studies are joining forces. There is a problem with the way AFCEE does things, which is they only update their plume maps once a year, so the depictions are actually fictional. That’s why Paul and I drew in that little sloppy FS-1 there because it just turns out it is a lot worse than they thought, also LF-1 is now in Red Brook Harbor and all of the JPO depictions show it stopping a good deal short of that…"

Mr. Murphy said, "Joel we have to wrap it up so we can get out of here so…"

Mr. Zanis interrupted and said, "I want to say it is real tough to pull up a bitmap and color it in…"

Mr. Murphy spoke over Mr. Zanis saying, "Paul, Paul, We really have to finish, LTC Knott has his thing up this will be the last word."

Dr. Feigenbaum said, "Well, that depends on what he says."

LTC Knott said, "This will be the last word for the National Guard Bureau tonight. The National Guard Bureau can not commit at this time to a date for the next Impact Area Review Team Meeting."

Mr. Hugus said, "Why not?…Why…?"

LTC Knott said, "That’s all I have to say."

Agenda Item #7. Other Issues

Agenda Item #9. Adjourn

Mr. Murphy said, "OK, well I guess we’ll…the date we were originally proposing was Tuesday, February 27, so I’ll be getting back in touch with people on that. Thanks for coming." The meeting was adjourned at 10:00 p.m.

Action Items:

1. DEP asked to hold the Approval of the Nov. 28 Minutes until the next IART due to the fact that the presenters were not able to review them. Status: The November28, 2000 IART minute’ approval is being held off until the next IART meeting.

2. Per Mr. Hugus’s request, Mr. Walsh-Rogalski said he would research EPCRA law on the subject of whether explosives that would trigger ‘Right-to-know’ in the community, and what limitations there may be on that Law.

3. Mr. Zanis requested the Guard to investigate and report the breakdown products of perchlorate.

4. Mr. Hugus requested that Perchlorate be added to the COC list.

5. Mr. Hugus requested TOSC members be provided monthly Technical Reports which contain information for modeling.

6. At the next IART, AMEC will provide information on where additional wells will be installed

7. The following items will be included on the next IART agenda:

1. ASR Interviews

2. Northwest Corner Summary of investigations

3. JPO will provide a map & fact sheet to be distributed that will contain IRP plumes and IAGWSP areas of contamination

Status of Action Items