Time‐Dependent Health Risk from Contaminated Groundwater Including Use of Reliability, Resilience, and Vulnerability as Measures

Abstract

Traditionally, assessment of human health risk caused by contamination of a water supply focuses on the maximum risk to an individual. Here, we introduce a time-dependent risk assessment method and adapt and explore the reliability, resilience, and vulnerability (RRV) criteria from the surface-water literature as possible tools for assessing this risk. Time-dependent risk assessment, including RRV, is applied to two synthetic examples where water quality at a well varies over time. We calculate time-dependent health risks for discrete periods of exposure to the contaminated water for a variable population. The RRV criteria provide information about time-dependent risk: probability of an acceptable risk, probability of system recovery, maximum risk, and average exceedance of a prescribed risk threshold. The results demonstrate that episodic contamination events produce fundamentally different time-dependent risks than long-term events: these differences, such as generally lower risks for the episodic contamination, can be captured via plots of the risk and the RRV criteria. Furthermore, the evaluation of time-dependent health risk and the RRV criteria demonstrates significant sensitivity to the shape of the contaminant breakthrough curve, length of exposure, and variability within the population. Overall, analysis of time-dependent health risks provides substantial insight into the structure of risk, with RRV providing a reasonable framework for the evaluation of these risks.(KEY TERMS: groundwater hydrology; risk assessment; drinking water; public health; cancer risk; groundwater contamination.) Rodak, Carolyn, Stephen E. Silliman, and Diogo Bolster, 2013. Time-Dependent Health Risk from Contaminated Groundwater Including Use of Reliability, Resilience, and Vulnerability as Measures.

Role of Microorganisms in Permeable Reactive Bio-Barriers (PRBBs) for Environmental Clean-Up: A Review

“…is of paramount importance. Due to a broad range of contaminants emerging from various sources poses a grave threat to the quality of groundwater (Schipper et al, 2010;Wiafe et al, 2013;Rodak et al, 2014). Earlier 'pump-and-treat' has been used for the remediation of contaminated groundwater.…”

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A Dynamic, Multivariate Sustainability Measure for Robust Analysis of Water Management under Climate and Demand Uncertainty in an Arid Environment

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