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Ground water purging and sampling methods: History vs. hysteria
Author(s) -
Barcelona M.J.,
Varljen M.D.,
Puls R.W.,
Kaminski D.
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
groundwater monitoring and remediation
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.677
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1745-6592
pISSN - 1069-3629
DOI - 10.1111/j.1745-6592.2005.0001.x
Subject(s) - hysteria , sampling (signal processing) , groundwater , environmental science , geology , geotechnical engineering , engineering , psychology , psychoanalysis , telecommunications , detector
We practice in a field that has seen remarkable progress in approaches to site characterization, monitoring, field instrumentation, and remedial technologies over the past 25 years. Cleanup approaches have been developed and successfully applied to sites that are contaminated with chemical constituents that very few people even knew existed until the mid-90s. It is an exciting field to work in because we have rapidly come a long way. At the same time, it is frustrating that issues that had largely been solved 10 or 20 years ago are still news to some practitioners. It has been over 10 years since the low-flow ground water purging and sampling method was initially reported in the literature. The method grew from the recognition that well purging was necessary to collect representative samples, bailers could not achieve well purging, and highflow purging produced large volumes of potentially contaminated water in need of transport and treatment. Low flow has been widely adopted, leading to documented, consistent performance in diverse hydrogeologic settings for virtually all analytes of interest. ‘‘Problem(s) solved?’’ Not quite! Despite the fact that the method has been shown to be useful in situations different from those in which the method was initially applied, there are regulators who refuse to approve its use or arbitrarily specify values for flow rate, drawdown, etc. In this review, we draw on the history of ground water purging and sampling methods to underscore the need to bring recognition of what works to assist in the development of regulatory guidance. In addition, we offer an illustrative example of low-flow purging and sampling performance under highand low drawdown conditions.