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Avoiding Pitfalls in Cleanup Statistics and Field Analytical Quality Assurance
Hosted by U.S. EPA
Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation

Know what statistics CAN do for you, CANNOT do for you & how your project gets into TROUBLE if you don’t know the difference

There will be very few, if any, equations: this is NOT a statistical theory or software course! This is a “foundations” course for understanding when to apply which statistics to cleanup tasks.

Goals of this Workshop are to understand:
  • Why are statistics used at all in environmental cleanup? For what cleanup decisions (e.g., establishing ARARs, site characterization, risk assessment, remedial design, long-term monitoring, NFA, etc.) can statistics be useful?
  • What are the benefits AND limitations of applying statistics in cleanups?
  • Basic statistical concepts and definitions.
  • The fundamental mismatch between common statistical assumptions & cleaning up real-world contaminated sites.
  • How the Triad framework provides a scientific foundation for correcting those mismatches, so statistics can be applied appropriately & transparently in the following contexts:
      • Constructing a workable, realistic conceptual site model (CSM)
      • Articulating project goals
        • AKA: What questions are we trying to answer? And how much scrutiny & controversy will those answers/decisions have to withstand?
      • Generating data to answer questions (How good does the data have to be?)
        • Establishing data quality & decision confidence requirements
        • Using real-time methods to address decision uncertainty via dynamic work strategies
        • Leveraging collaborative data sets by coordinating different analytical methods within the sampling design
        • Building collaborative data strategies into traditional and dynamic data collection programs
        • Interpreting collaborative and real-time data set results
Instructors: Deana Crumbling, Stephen Dyment (USEPA Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Information) and Robert L. Johnson (Argonne National Laboratory) For general information contact Deana Crumbling by telephone at 703-603-0643 or via e-mail at crumbling.deana@epa.gov

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