Features

• Serves as a single-source reference for designing, conducting, evaluating, and reviewing field exploration programs at FMGPs and other coal-tar sites
• Explores the essential elements of information necessary to ensure thorough and accurate characterization and successful remediation, with a focus on public health and safety
• Includes 265 data tables, 375 historical and remedial photographs and drawings, and a glossary of terms used in the manufactured gas industry
• Presents an overview of the most common gas industry procedures, equipment, feedstocks, and disposal methods used at different times throughout the industry's 160-year history
• Offers a guide to the present regulatory situation in North America and in the UK
• Assesses the corporate nature of the Potential Responsible Parties (PRPs) being held accountable for contributions toward funding coal-tar cleanup actions

Summary

Remediation of Former Manufactured Gas Plants and Other Coal-Tar Sites is geared toward environmental professionals who want to design and implement gasworks remediation strategies that offer the greatest chance to successfully protect the public. Exploring the bases for selecting remedial alternatives to adequately address today’s environmental wounds, this compendium of essential knowledge combines historic and modern scientific data and technology with common sense and empirical lore passed down from past generations of gas professionals, a group that is now all but extinct.

Most of the general population does not have a sufficient understanding of remediation needs. Unfortunately, there seems to be a similar lack of knowledge among some environmental professionals whose job it is to protect the public from the health threats associated with coal tar. Pitfalls in remediation are common and represent a significant risk to the public, especially when processes are based on inaccurate assumptions.

This book sifts through the existing scholarship from around the developed world to present the necessary evaluation factors used in effective remediation. Almost encyclopedic in scope, it offers 265 separate tables with checklists, hard data facts, and associations to help readers define site-specific gas plant conditions. It also includes a plethora of photographs and historic drawings, as well as an extensive glossary that is indispensible for understanding potential and actual gas plant contamination.

Useful for engineers, scientists, regulators, public officials, historians, and journalists among others, this book is intended for those who conduct remediation, as well as those involved in review and oversight. Its goal is to bring users closer to safely reclaiming land and reviving old coal gasworks sites in ways that ultimately will be sustainable for the public interest.