MARINE SEDIMENT AND ELUTRIATE TESTING

Testing of marine sediments and elutriates has become routine among the testing services provided by Calscience. The majority of marine sediment testing is in support of dredging operations at the major Southern California port facilities, including Los Angeles, Long Beach, and San Diego. Marine sediments, especially from port environments, can be especially challenging matrices because of high hydrocarbon, salt, and metal concentrations.

The tests commonly performed for marine sediments include trace metals, TOC, petroleum hydrocarbons, sulfides, pesticides and PCBs, grain size, PAHs, and other semi-volatile compounds. Achieving the low reporting limits required for these parameters requires special sample cleanup/preparation procedures developed by Calscience and incorporated into our SOPs. The low-level analysis of sediment, pore water, and elutriate also requires specialized instrumentation. Calscience has acquired the most advanced instrumentation for this purpose including Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectroscopy (ICP-MS), cold-vapor atomic absorption (CVAA) technique, and Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectroscopy (GC/MS).

Elutriate testing is a bench-scale test designed to simulate and predict the water quality impacts from dredging or dredged material disposal. Dredging operations are routinely conducted in local ports and coastal areas, and in inland waterways. These projects typically require planning and/or investigations to determine if water quality will be affected. Elutriate testing is an important component of the planning process.

A number of guidance documents and research papers include elutriate testing protocol. All documents were developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and in some cases, in concert with the U.S. EPA. These include:

The "Green Book"

Evaluations of Dredged Material Proposed for Ocean Disposal Testing Manual, 1991.

The Inland Testing Manual

Evaluation of Dredged Material Proposed for Discharge in Waters of the U.S. Testing Manual, 1998.

The Upland Testing Manual

Evaluation of Dredged Material Proposed for Placement In Island, Nearshore, or Upland CDFs Testing Manual, 2003.

Dredging Elutriate Test (DRET) Development

DiGiano, Francis, et. al., 1995.

Calscience has supported dredging and dredged material disposal projects over the years, and has assembled facilities and developed procedures for the following elutriate tests:

• SET - Standard Elutriate Test (Open Water Disposal)
• MET - Modified Elutriate Test (Open Water or Confined/Diked Disposal)
• EET - Effluent Elutriate Test (Confined or Diked Disposal)
• DRET - Dredging Elutriate Test (Point of Dredging)

Each of these procedures can be tailored to meet the specific objectives of a project. For any elutriate testing project, chemical analysis of the following sample sources is provided: site sediment, site water, and the elutriates, including the filtered supernatant and unfiltered supernatant.

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