USGS Report Released: Investigations of Groundwater System and Simulation of Regional Groundwater Flow for North Penn Area 7 Superfund Site, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania

Recently, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) released a report titled Investigations of Groundwater System and Simulation of Regional Groundwater Flow for North Penn Area 7 Superfund Site, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania (USGS Open File Rep. 2013-5045). The 112-page report available here, authored by Lisa A. Senior and Daniel J. Goode discusses the following:

Groundwater in the vicinity of several industrial facilities in Upper Gwynedd Township and vicinity, Montgomery County, in southeast Pennsylvania has been shown to be contaminated with volatile organic compounds (VOCs), the most common of which is the solvent trichloroethylene (TCE). The 2-square-mile area was placed on the National Priorities List as the North Penn Area 7 Superfund site by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) in 1989. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) conducted geophysical logging, aquifer testing, and water-level monitoring, and measured streamflows in and near North Penn Area 7 from fall 2000 through fall 2006 in a technical assistance study for the USEPA to develop an understanding of the hydrogeologic framework in the area as part of the USEPA Remedial Investigation. In addition, the USGS developed a groundwater-flow computer model based on the hydrogeologic framework to simulate regional groundwater flow and to estimate directions of groundwater flow and pathways of groundwater contaminants. The study area is underlain by Triassic- and Jurassic-age sandstones and shales of the Lockatong Formation and Brunswick Group in the Mesozoic Newark Basin. Regionally, these rocks strike northeast and dip to the nappear to differ much by mapped geologic unit, but showed some relation to depth being relatively smaller in the shallowest and deepest intervals (0 to 50 ft and more than 250 ft below land surface, respectively) compared to the intermediate depth intervals (50 to 250 ft below land surface) tested. Transmissivities estimated from multiple-observation well aquifer tests ranged from about 700 to 2,300 ft²/d (65 to 214 m²/d)....