A large commercial warehouse located within the greater Toronto area had several locations with VOC contamination in the underlying soil. The VOCs needed to be remediated, but it was unknown how deep or widespread the contamination was, requiring the VOC impacted areas to be delineated.

Soil boreholes were drilled and sampled within the building footprint; however, because this method was intrusive to ongoing operations of the building tenants, drilling needed to be minimized. Traditional delineation methods would drill a set of boreholes around the area of contamination and laboratory samples would be submitted to determine if the delineating boreholes were clean. If the new boreholes were noted to still be contaminated, another round of delineation drilling would be prescribed, and the process would repeat until the edges of the contaminated areas were located. In general, this approach can result in substantial time spent on site over multiple visits, affecting project costs and in this case, increasing interference with the site operations.

To reduce the time and costs required to complete the delineation, AEL deployed the mobile GC/MS during the first round of drilling, using the GC/MS at each borehole to characterize VOCs in real time. If results on the GC/MS indicated the soil was clean, no further delineation was required. However, if the GC/MS indicated contamination was present, the borehole was abandoned and a secondary borehole was advanced at a further distance from the contamination. In this way, all of the delineation was carried out in a single visit, rather than across multiple drilling events it would traditionally require. On-site testing using the highly accurate GC/MS device resulted in significant cost savings on the investigation as well as by minimizing disruptions to facility operations.

Could your environmental remediation project costs be reduced through on-site testing? Contact us today to discuss your project specifics and options.