Fort Leavenworth, KS

The Challenge

Fort Leavenworth is a 5,634-acre U.S. Army facility in Kansas. Established in 1827 it is the oldest continuously operating Army installation west of the Mississippi River.

Numerous environmental investigations have taken place at the Fort since the early 1980s.  In 1985, the Fort was issued a Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) Part B Permit for hazardous waste storage.  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) issued Part II of the RCRA Permit to the Fort on July 25, 2000.  This permit addresses the on-site corrective action requirements for solid waste management units (SWMUs) and other hazardous and solid waste amendment (HSWA) requirements as administered and enforced by the U.S. EPA.

ARCADIS has been contracted to remediate the SWMUs through the Part II Permit and is working closely with the Fort Leavenworth Restoration Program to achieve this goal.  Many of the sites are to be closed out, with regulatory approval for no further action. The other sites will be taken through the Decision Document phase, which will map out the work needed to close out the sites per regulatory mandates.

The main focus of corrective action process will be to achieve regulatory closure based on acceptable risk and reasonable future land use. 

The Solution

The sites to be addressed under ARCADIS' contract range from landfills and ponds, to a dry cleaning facility. ARCADIS is utilizing its innovative corrective action technologies on many of the tasks at Fort Leavenworth. The technologies being considered include:

• Enhanced reductive dehalogenation (ERD) using molasses injections are being used to treat two areas of groundwater plumes contaminated with chlorinated solvents.  One of the groundwater plumes, located on the alluvial floodplain of the Missouri River, has the potential to adversely affect the Fort's public water supply wells, so rapid reduction of the contaminant mass is critical in designing a remedial strategy.
  
• Innovative landfill technologies such as engineered vegetative landfill covers including evapotranspiration covers and capillary barriers.
  
• In-situ metals stabilization to reduce the bioavailability of heavy metal contaminants in soils. 

ARCADIS' remedial engineers work closely with our fate and transport modeling experts and risk assessment specialists to select and design corrective action remedies that are protective and cost effective, both from the aspect of initial construction costs as well as long-term operations and maintenance costs.

This project is contracted under our Guaranteed Remediation Program GRiPâ which provides a fixed price for remediation and guaranteed regulatory closure. This is the first contract of this type awarded jointly by the Corps of Engineers and the Department of the Army. This contracting mechanism allows ARCADIS to assume total responsibility for all project planning and execution. ARCADIS is working directly with two different regulatory agencies and the Army to negotiate closure decisions based on acceptable risks and planned future land use.