Background/Objectives. Groundwater remedy optimization developed for the United States Navy under the Comprehensive Long-Term Environmental Action Navy (CLEAN), for Naval Industrial Reserve Ordnance Plant (NIROP), Fridley, Minnesota, improved protectiveness of an operating remedy. Naval weapons systems were designed and manufactured at NIROP from the 1940s to present, resulting in soil and groundwater contamination, primarily with trichloroethene (TCE) and associated degradation products. The TCE plume occurs in a complex Pleistocene Age unconsolidated drift cut by ancestral Mississippi River channel deposits over 100 feet thick, which consist of predominantly sands with intermittent silt and clay which control permeability. Adding complexity to the system, in isolated areas where confining units are absent, the entire unconsolidated unit acts as a single unconfined aquifer. As a result, preferential groundwater flow within the drift/fluvial deposits consist primarily of sand and gravel and vary significantly in thickness and hydraulic connection throughout the site, making plume transport quite complicated.
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