EnviroNotes

By Andy Bowman, Chair, Environmental Law Department, Bingham McHale LLP

Anyone who uses the Risk Integrated System of Closure (RISC) Technical Guidance knows how tedious it can be to search over 60 pages of tables looking for the applicable closure criteria. To simplify this process, the IDEM Office of Land Quality (OLQ) recently made available a useful aid called the “RISC Default Closure Tool.” The Tool is a Microsoft Excel (tm) based spreadsheet which provides a convenient and quick means of looking up the default closure levels located in the 2006 version of Appendix I of the RISC Technical Guidance. Eventually, the OLQ plans to make similar tools available for the 2001 and 2004 versions of Appendix I. The RISC Default Closure Tool can be downloaded to your desktop.

The Tool provides users with several alternative views of Appendix I, including a standard view of the tables as they appear in Appendix I; a compilation of information from various tables for a user-selected contaminant; a user-customized view; and a standard view for user-selected contaminants. The custom view is particularly useful and allows the user to create tables limited to commonly encountered contaminants such as BTEX and MTBE showing both industrial and residential closure criteria.

The RISC Default Closure Tool can be obtained here. Because the Tool utilizes macros, you may need to adjust your filter settings or enable macros to use the Tool (after checking with your IT manager, of course).

<< Previous Page