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CAP Addendum:Former Fuellfg Station, 7500 West Eleventh Street, Tracy, Page 16 <br /> For the LNAPL component of the total contaminant mass in the subsurface and its <br /> contribution to dissolved contaminants in groundwater the situation is quite different. As <br /> long as LNAPL is present and in contact with groundwater, it will maintain the <br /> concentration of contaminants in the groundwater at the top of a vertical zone that <br /> extends some 10 ft. below the "smear" zone at concentrations close to the fuel's <br /> solubility limit (Chiang et. al. 1989, Robbins and Martin-Hayden 1991). Within that <br /> zone, contaminant concentrations will be at their greatest at its top and will decline with <br /> depth from there in a Gaussian distribution to the bottom of the 10 ft. deep zone <br /> (American Society for Testing and Materials 2004). As it happens, at the Navarra Site the <br /> distance from the bottom of the smear zone to the bottom of the contaminated aquifer is, <br /> on average, approximately 10 ft. (The San Joaquin Company Inc. 2006). <br /> As was cited in Section 2.3.2, depending upon the in situ conditions in the subsurface, the <br /> solubility of diesel fuel ranges from 1,000 to 3,000 µg/L and, depending upon the fraction <br /> of fuel oxygenates that it contains, the solubility of gasoline can range from 10,000 gg/L <br /> to 200,000 µg/L. Excluding results from analyses on samples of groundwater recovered <br /> from Monitoring Well MW-7 that SJC believes were affected by fine particles of <br /> emulsified LNAPL (which samples are often characterized by a distinctive gray <br /> coloration of the quiescent water), the concentrations of dissolved diesel fuel in <br /> groundwater in the area around that well have ranged up to 3,600 µg/L and the gasoline <br /> concentrations have ranged up to 37,000 µg/L. The causation of these high contaminant <br /> concentrations is obviously dominated by components of fuel hydrocarbons passing into <br /> solution from the LNAPL that is floating on the groundwater <br /> From the foregoing discussions, it is now clear that an appropriate measure of the <br /> performance requirements for the remediation technology proposed for the Navarra Site <br /> is not an estimate of the total mass of contaminants that can be removed from the <br /> subsurface but the degree to which LNAPL can be eliminated. <br /> In Section 2.2.1.1 a very conservative-estimate was made that 1,050 gallons of LNAPL <br /> may remain in the subsurface beneath the Navarra Site. In Section 2.1.6, the severe <br /> limitations of the state of the art for estimating the portion of total LNAPL affecting a <br /> specific site that can be recovered were explained and an order of magnitude estimate of <br /> 525 to 1,050 gallons for the volume of LNAPL that may recoverable from beneath the <br /> Navarra Site was established. If the actual recovery is some 525 gallons, that will <br /> represent half of the total LNAPL estimated to be present, while a recovery of 1,050 <br /> gallons would eliminate all of the LNAPL estimated to be present in the subsurface. <br /> If 50% of the LNAPL is recovered by pumping from the extraction trench, a transition <br /> from anaerobic to aerobic conditions in the groundwater in the vicinity of Monitoring <br /> Well MW-7 would not be achieved immediately. However, as was demonstrated by the <br /> evaluation of natural attenuation processes active at the Site, natural attenuation processes <br /> are active in that area although the processes there are anaerobic and are thus acting more <br /> slowly than in areas of the site where aerobic conditions prevail in the groundwater. A <br /> 50% reduction in the volume of LNAPL would halve the time required for aerobic <br /> conditions to be initiated, which is always accompanied by a rapid increase in the natural <br />