Development of a systematic approach for analyzing risk-based corrective action plans applied at petroleum release sites.

摘要

This dissertation reviews environmental laws and analyzes the results of risk-based management procedures mandated by Congress. The United Sates Congress ordered that state and federal cleanup funds be disbursed based on a quantifiable, risk-based formula and that information about each discharge be collected and stored in a publicly accessible database. After a thorough literature review, no researcher has examined or documented the results contained therein. Data collected by field inspectors evaluating discharges of various types was evaluated in Minitab, and the results show interesting contrasts among various levels of enforcement. Enforcement of environmental laws was shown to be a function of fuel tax rates, particularly the local option sales tax that many counties have imposed to acquire environmentally sensitive lands, enforce state and federal laws regarding protection of the environment, and fund local Departments of Environmental Protection (DEP).;Alachua County has historically been on the cutting edge of passing and strictly enforcing environmental laws. In fact, Alachua County has on several occasions tried to adopt local codes that are more stringent than state law only to have the effort be ruled unconstitutional. A stepwise comparison showed this county to score discharges above the quantified level of risk of the rest of the state but clearly below the funding threshold. This result is significant in the sense that when discharges do occur in Alachua County, one is more likely to face fines and penalties without cleanup reimbursement from the IPTF trust fund.;Another surprising result of this research is that Miami-Dade County, which has adopted its own set of environmental guidelines separate from the rest of the state (e.g., vapor recovery), had a much lower overall score mean and a corresponding higher average ranking. These differences compare equally to Alachua County and other counties that have adopted the highest allowable local option motor fuel tax. Additionally, rural counties tended to have fewer discharges at higher overall scores, above the funding threshold, than more urban counties.;A discharge and its corresponding level of contamination are scored based on the amount of hydrocarbons released into the environment and the exposure of the discharge to potable wells. Fire and explosion hazards also figure into the scoring review, as do the migration potential and overall environmental setting the discharge occurs in. Ideally, this review is based on the facts pertaining to each discharge. If this is true, then a random sample of data selected from the main database should provide an even representation of discharges without noticeable differences between the main database and the sample. However, noticeable differences were detected using 95% confidence intervals with a P-value of 0.005.;The data followed a classic normal distribution, thereby facilitating the use of the "Student's t-distribution" to illustrate the margin of error and mean. Box plots also were used to compare the median or the centermost value among different counties. It was interesting to note that the results showed considerable bias in the reporting of discharges. Counties with higher tax rates consistently ranked higher than the rest of the state and had lower overall scores.