Essential Management Solutions Wins NGWA's Groundwater Remediation Award

Essential Management Solutions LLC of Evergreen, Colorado, has received an Outstanding Groundwater Project Award from the National Ground Water Association for excellence in restoring contaminated groundwater.

The award will be presented in December at the 2014 NGWA Groundwater Expo and Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The project took place from 2009-2013 at the former Herington Army Airfield located in Herington, Kansas, to remediate trichloroethylene (TCE). The TCE had impacted the overburden soil and three underlying bedrock units at the site — resulting in a dissolved plume that extended about six miles off-site.

The project used an innovative continuous oxidant injection method that evolved from an original attempt at this approach elsewhere in 2007.

Conventional wisdom for in situ chemical oxidation (ISCO) projects assumes that multiple injections are required over time. Successful remediation with ISCO has been hampered by heterogeneous geology and geochemical constraints like natural oxidant demand and matrix diffusion. The high costs associated with the conventional approach to ISCO has dampened enthusiasm for it.

The most difficult challenge for ISCO has been addressing contaminants trapped in immobile groundwater pores and dead-end spaces, and treating contaminants diffused into finer grain units (matrix diffusion). ISCO treatment improvements over the last decade have largely focused on efficient and effective application methods accelerating reagent-contaminant contact, but have neglected to address the challenge of matrix diffusion.

The success of Essential Management Solutions’ application method in the Herington project has significantly expedited the timeframe to remediate groundwater at the site and impacted areas downgradient.

About NGWA
NGWA, a nonprofit organization composed of U.S. and international groundwater professionals — contractors, equipment manufacturers, suppliers, scientists, and engineers — is dedicated to advancing groundwater knowledge. NGWA's vision is to be the leading groundwater association that advocates the responsible development, management, and use of water.