Overview of Ecological and Human Health Risk Assessment Guidance for Dredged Material Management

Overview of Ecological and

Human Health Risk

Assessment Guidance for

Dredged Material Management

Purpose and Organization

Purpose

This document provides guidance to United States Army Corps of Engineers

(USACE) project managers and field operations personnel in the use of risk

assessment to facilitate dredged material management decision-making. It

specifically addresses the management of dredged material in an aquatic

environment. It does not address risk associated with the management of dredged

material in upland environments. Also, the document addresses only chemical

contamination and does not address other potential sources of impact such as

physical disturbance. The intended audience and user community are the individual

scientists and managers making decisions where there are competing interests on the

dredging and disposal management of sediments from the nation's waterways.

The document does not promote risk assessment as a tool for use in every

dredged material management decision. It is likely to be most useful, and most used,

in those cases which constitute the exception rather than the rule. The use of risk

assessment is intended to supplement the analytical options currently available to

dredged material managers by building on the existing technical framework United

States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA)/USACE 1992) and the existing

tiered sediment evaluation approaches (USEPA/USACE 1991, 1998).

Scientific advancements have made possible the collection of large amounts of

complex information regarding the environmental aspects of dredging and dredged

material disposal. The dredged material manager must often use "best professional

judgement" to weigh and balance among multiple and sometimes conflicting lines of

evidence to reach a decision. Environmental risk assessment provides a stepwise

framework for the integration of complex information to yield quantifiable estimates

of risk including uncertainty. In addition, risk assessment allows the dredged

material manager to make explicit the types of information considered and how a

Chapter 1 Overview of Ecological and Human Health Risk