The Influence of Black Swans on the Effectiveness of Remediating Groundwater Contamination

Black swans, outliers, dominate science far more than predictable outcomes. Neither the environmental consulting nor regulatory industries appreciate that, ironically, predictable success constitutes the black swan in groundwater cleanup. Even the National Research Council recently concluded that groundwater cleanup to drinking water standards has nationally been a broad failure in typical complex hydrogeologic settings. Payne and others in their book Remediation Hydraulics abandoned the notion that representation of the subsurface through large-scale averages and steady-state observations can adequately support groundwater remedy designs. Groundwater consultants in their cleanup efforts would better serve themselves and their clients by coupling parsimonious site characterization to natural and induced geochemical tracer tests, and regulatory agencies would better serve the public by recognizing that groundwater cleanup can be futile in many settings except to low brownfield standards.