The Alberta Tier 1 Soil and Groundwater Remediation Guidelines are developed and updated by Alberta Environment and Parks through the legislative basis provided by the Water Act(Government of Alberta, 2000) and the Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act(Government of Alberta, 2006). The Tier 1 guidelines are generic and were created to protect sites that are found on the more sensitive side of the range. They are part of Alberta’s framework for managing contaminated sites, which were developed to pursue the goals of preventing pollution, protecting human health and the environment, and fostering productive use throughout Alberta. The guidelines provide requirements and directions for the remediation of contamination in industrial, residential, commercial and cultivated lands. Tier 1 soil remediation guidelines have numerical targets that are applied in remediating contaminated soil. On the other hand, Tier 1 groundwater remediation guidelines protect indoor air quality, water quality for various uses, and plant and soil invertebrates.
Tier 1 guidelines are derived using models that integrate toxicity information, transport mechanisms, and receptor characteristics. The process entails identifying receptors and exposure pathways, defining suitable protection endpoints, finding the concentration of substances in soil or groundwater, and determining the overall Tier 1 risk-based guideline. Site assessment and characterization is done before using these guidelines to identify applicable procedures. The data requirement for site assessment includes; site description, human receptors, ecological receptors, nearness to drinking and surface water supplies, potential and actual uses of groundwater, land use, stratigraphy, depth to groundwater, building structures, contamination characterization, and the extent of vertical and horizontal contamination. Tier 2 guidelines are applied in situations where Tier 1 guidelines are not applicable.
Alberta Tier 1 Soil and Groundwater Remediation Guidelines are now available in ESdat. ESdat is a specialist environmental database system; used to validate and import a broad spectrum of Environmental Data and to help users analyze and report it.
ESdat Online delivers a highly cost-effective and efficient approach to store your ongoing monitoring environmental data, optionally with a historical data upload provided as a getting started service. ESdat Online is perfect if you want a cloud-based system that collates and reports your ongoing laboratory and field results.
ESdat Server provides the advantages of ESdat Online with the option of adding ESdat Desktop for data experts to upload their historical data, effectively interrogate the raw data being used within the database, and automatically launch and send data to other Desktop Applications such as Surfer, ArcGIS and Excel.
A variety of complementary products are also available to help with related work, such as sample planning and electronic Chain of Custody (LSPECS), offline field data collection or bore logging (pLog), production of bore logs (ESlog) public portals and customized reporting.
All compiled environmental guidelines and standards are shown on the ESdat website. These are pre-loaded into ESdat Online.
Reference
Alberta Government (2019). Alberta Tier 1 Soil and Groundwater Remediation Guidelines. Retrieved from https://open.alberta.ca/dataset/842becf6-dc0c-4cc7-8b29-e3f383133ddc/resource/a5cd84a6-5675-4e5b-94b8-0a36887c588b/download/albertatier1guidelines-jan10-2019.pdf
