Environmental Impact Statement Research Articles

Indigenous peoples and the power(lessness) of public participation: Assessing effects of Indigenous community input in the Alaskan Coastal Plain oil and gas leasing program environmental impact statement

Public participation in the U.S. environmental impact assessment process is legally required under the National Environmental Policy Act, yet the procedural norms of the process often leave members of the public feeling powerless. While public participation has the appearance of a democratic process, it is imbued with unequal power dynamics and federal agencies maintain decision-making authority. Despite sovereignty and treaty rights, Indigenous communities in the U.S. do not participate in environmental decision-making through a collaborative governance structure. Instead, Indigenous communities interested in project impacts primarily voice their concerns through the public comment process. This paper explores Indigenous participants’ impacts on environmental impact decision-making through an illustrative case study structure. The phenomenon is explored in an in-depth analysis of the recent leasing environmental impact statement (EIS) for oil exploration and development in the 1002 Coastal Plain area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. This work uses a qualitative content analysis of the Coastal Plain case study to assess how public comments, particularly comments from Indigenous peoples, impact change in the documents that follow public participation processes. From this analysis, this article aims to illustrate a few key issues with how Indigenous input is considered in public participation processes. Findings indicate that public comments may result in minor changes to assessment documents but, overall, public input has little influence on project outcomes.

Consideration of Climate Change on Environmental Impact Assessment in Tanzania: Challenges and Prospects.

The potential of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process to respond to climate change impacts of development projects can only be realized with the support of policies, regulations, and actors' engagement. While considering climate change in EIA has become partly mandatory through the EU revised Directive in Europe, African countries are still lagging. This paper assesses Tanzanian policies, laws, regulations, and EIA reports to uncover consideration of climate change impacts, adaptation, and mitigation measures, drawing from the transformational role of EIA. The methodology integrates content analysis, interpretive policy analysis, and discourse analysis. The analyses draw from environmental policy, three regulatory documents and three EIA reports in Tanzania using a multi-cases study design. The aim was to understand how considering Climate Change issues in EIA has played out in practice. Results reveal less consideration of climate change issues in EIA. The policy, laws, and regulations do not guide when and how the EIA process should consider climate change-related impacts mitigation and adaptation. The practice of EIA in the country is utterly procedural in line with regulations provisions. Consequently, environmental impact statements only profile the climatology of the study area without conducting a deeper analysis of the historical and future climate to enhance the resilience of proposed projects. The weakness exposed in the laws and regulations contributes to the challenges of responding to the impacts of climate change through the EIA process. It is possible to address climate change issues throughout the project life cycle, including design, approval, implementation, monitoring, and auditing, provided the policy and regulations guide how and when the EIA process should consider climate change issues. Additionally, increasing stakeholders' awareness and participation can enhance the EIA process's potential to respond to the impacts of climate change.

Environmental impact assessments should include rigorous scientific peer review

Twenty USA states or jurisdictions and 125 nations have modeled national environmental policies after the National Environmental Policy Act. That act mandates that federal agencies initiate environmental impact statements (EISs) when substantive environmental or human health consequences are likely because of an agency action related to proposed development projects. The science used to inform the EIS process, however, does not require independent scientific peer review (ISPR) in the USA or most other nations. But ISPR is needed for governments to accurately inform the EIS decision-making and public reporting processes. Instead, science is routinely manipulated during EIS reviews to generate expedient project outcomes with substantially negative ecological, political, and long-term economic consequences. We provide four examples of EISs that lack ISPR, as well as four examples where reviews by independent scientists were helpful to improve agency decisions. We also recommend that independent scientists (no affiliation with the project proponents or agencies overseeing projects) be used to help assess potential environmental and socio-economic impacts, as well as offer appropriate risk assessments, study designs, and monitoring timeframes. We conclude that nations should convene formal reviews using independent scientists as a form of peer review in the EIS process.

Evolution of the Polygon of the Protected Natural Area “Parque Nacional Sistema Arrecifal Veracruzano” Due to the Expansion of the Port of Veracruz, Mexico

The Port of Veracruz, Mexico was artificially built at the beginning of the 21st century, dredging the sea floor and removing reefs to allow the entry of large ships, which led to a growth in the traffic of goods and people through it, making it the largest commercial port in all of Mexico. In 1992 the Government of Mexico decreed the area of coastal reefs near the Port of Veracruz as a protected natural area with the name of the Parque Nacional Sistema Arrecifal Veracruzano (PSNSAV). In 2013, with the demand of international trade, the decision was made to expand the port, generating job growth in the area and an increase in the flow of containers and automobiles, also have a greater capacity to transport cereals, minerals and fuels. In contrast to the disagreements of the society due to the loss of protected space, the Parks polygon had to be modified. This work try to demonstrated that the construction of the port expansion began previous the presentation to the environmental authorities of the Environmental Impact Statement and the change in the protected limits with the disappearance of the Punta Gorda reefs and the dredging of Vergara Bay for the arrival of deep draft vessels. Through a systematic mapping of the scientific literature combined with satellite mapping and visual interpretation of images, and documentary analysis, we determined the damage to the reef system, which has protected species according to Mexican national regulations.

A Quality Review of EIA: A Comparative Study of State-Funded and International Aid Agency-funded Development Projects in Sri Lanka

A development project's environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a tool for mitigating the effects on the environment and promoting sustainable development. EIA is an expensive and professionally engaged process that involves the public. Many countries around the world have long-standing laws in place connected to this topic, as well as solid knowledge and experience. One persistent argument against the efficacy of EIA in developing nations is that the procedure and quality differ from country to country. The International Aid Agencies (IAA) have their guidelines for protecting the environment while following local environmental assessment standards for any financing requirements. IAA involvement in the EIA process might significantly affect how well- written EIA reports are. To evaluate the assessment quality, six EIA reports from state-financed development projects (SL-EIAs) and another six development projects EIAs funded by the IAA (IAA-EIAs) in Sri Lanka were randomly chosen. LeeCooley review package (1990) was used to evaluate the Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) of each EIA. In this investigation, it was discovered that IAA-EIAs and SL-EIAs had a significant difference in overall quality. IAA-EIAs show values that range from highly satisfactory to satisfactory and each share 50 percent, whereas SL-EIAs indicate 83 percent satisfactory and 17 percent of borderline quality. In comparison to the SL-EIAs, all four review areas of the IAA-EIAs performed notably well. While the SL-EIA shows good to borderline quality (0.66-0.72), all evaluated IAA-EIA reports reveal highly satisfactory to satisfactory (0.81-0.93) quality. The engagement of IAA in the environmental assessment has a considerable impact to improve assessment quality in comparison to the only domestic assessment. Finding the weak area in the SL-EIA process and adhering to the IAA standards would elevate the standard of the report.
 Keywords: EIA quality, Review, International Aid Agency, Development projects

Methodology for Exploring Water and Hydropower Operating Criteria That Simultaneously Improve Economic and Environmental Considerations

Despite the reliability and flexibility of hydropower, the operation of hydroelectric power plants may have significant impacts on the downstream river system, including its water stage, sediment transport, and water temperature, ultimately affecting the ecology. To address these challenges, there is a need to identify water scheduling patterns that improve both hydropower economics and the environment relative to current operations. This paper presents a new methodology to explore promising operational criteria/rules that can achieve such improvements. Typical environmental impact statements and relicensing processes generally perform detailed site-specific analyses of a few alternatives that focus on reservoir water release operating rules and their associated environmental impacts. In contrast, the methodology presented in this article uses a widely applicable approach that explores a much larger solution space. This large set of potential alternatives can be represented in a multidimensional space for which one axis represents the economic value and the other axis quantify individual environmental impacts (e.g., sediment transport and fish growth), and they are explored via two approaches: a Monte Carlo simulation that identifies “win–win” alternatives and a multi-objective optimization problem that identifies Pareto-optimal alternatives.

An environmental impact statement for molecular anions.

A molecular anion's (MA's) chemical reactivity and physical behavior can be quite different when it is surrounded by other molecules than when it exists in isolation. This sensitivity to the surrounding environment is especially high for anions because their outermost valence electrons are typically loosely bound and exist in rather spatially diffuse orbitals, allowing even weak intermolecular interactions arising from the environment to have strong effects. This Perspective offers illustrations of such sensitivity for a variety of cases including (i) the effect of solvation on electron binding energies, (ii) how some "well known" anions need to have solvent molecules around to even exist as stable species, (iii) how internal Coulomb repulsions within a multiply charged MA can provide temporary stability toward electron loss, (iv) how MAs arrange themselves spatially near liquid/vapor interfaces in manners that can produce unusual reactivity, (v) how nearby cationic sites can facilitate electron attachment to form a MA site elsewhere, (vi) how internal vibrational or rotational energy can make a MA detach an electron.

A hazard analysis of federal permitting under the national environmental policy act of 1970

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970 requires federal agencies to assess the environmental impact of proposed federal actions. NEPA thus affects delivery of a wide range of infrastructure projects. NEPA requires the completion of an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for environmentally impactful federal actions. For infrastructure projects this can entail significant delays. A typical EIS now takes about four and one-half years and is over 600 pages long. Some EIS’s take over a decade to complete. We provide the first detailed analysis of project approval times under NEPA by examining 1269 EIS permitting processes. We analyze empirically the well-defined interval from Notice of Intent to file to Record of Decision (ROD). We use a Cox proportional hazard model to estimate the impact of several factors on EIS duration. Factors include permits featuring major construction, those including private investment, those for projects located in states with restrictive environmental laws, those using the federal permitting “dashboard,” and those publishing a Supplemental EIS prior to the ROD. We find that privately financed projects receive faster permitting, while projects involving major construction, those undertaken in restrictive states, and those utilizing the federal permitting dashboard, face slower permitting times. We also explore links between EIS page counts and permitting time. Greater EIS page counts are associated with longer permitting times. We conclude by examining EIS completion during economic stimulus programs such as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), as well as the frequency of EIS completion by the federal government.

Application of audio spectrogram transformer machine learning model for audio tagging of construction activities

Major construction projects are approved based on an Environmental Impact Statement, which includes modeled predictions of noise impacts based on planned program. However, actual on site construction activities can differ significantly from planned works, resulting in modeled acoustic impacts (which have been used to mitigate impacts and inform stakeholders) out of date. A potential solution to this may be the use of machine learning models, to initially classify, and later predict, actual on site activities and commensurate impacts on nearby stakeholder and communities caused by site works. By leveraging emerging lower cost, smaller noise monitoring devices more data can be collected at receivers, and classified to determine the contributing sources of sound. SiteHive has worked with the University of Technology Sydney to design and develop a machine learning model to classify construction works in real-time on site, integrated as part of the SiteHive Hexanode multi-sensor environmental monitoring device. This presentation will showcase the design and development undertaken to date, and highlight results as tested as part of a major works program.

Parameters, practices, and preferences for regulatory review of emerging biotechnology products in food and agriculture.

This paper evaluates the U.S. regulatory review of three emerging biotechnology products according to parameters, practices, and endpoints of assessments that are important to stakeholders and publics. First, we present a summary of the literature on variables that are important to non-expert publics in governing biotech products, including ethical, social, policy process, and risk and benefit parameters. Second, we draw from our USDA-funded project results that surveyed stakeholders with subject matter expertise about their attitudes towards important risk, benefit, sustainability, and societal impact parameters for assessing novel agrifood technologies, including biotech. Third, we evaluate the regulatory assessments of three food and agricultural biotechnology case studies that have been reviewed under U.S. regulatory agencies and laws of the Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of Biotechnology, including gene-edited soybeans, beef cattle, and mustard greens. Evaluation of the regulatory review process was based on parameters identified in steps 1 and 2 which were deemed important to both publics and stakeholders. Based on this review, we then propose several policy options for U.S. federal agencies to strengthen their oversight processes to better align with a broader range of parameters to support sustainable agrifood products that rely on novel technologies. These policy options include 1) those that would not require new institutions or legal foundations (such as conducting Environmental Impact Statements and/or requiring a minimal level of safety data), 2) those that would require a novel institutional or cross-institutional framework (such as developing a publicly-available website and/or performing holistic sustainability assessments), and 3) those that would require the agencies to have additional legal authorities (such as requiring agencies to review biotech products according to a minimal set of health, environmental, and socio-economic parameters). Overall, the results of this analysis will be important for guiding policy practice and formulation in the regulatory assessment of emerging biotechnology products that challenge existing legal and institutional frameworks.

A quality review of EIA: A comparative study of state-funded and International Aid Agency funded development projects in Sri Lanka

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is a tool for mitigating the effects of developmental projects on the environment and promoting sustainable development. EIA is an expensive, and professionally engaged process that involves the public. Many countries around the world have long-standing laws in place connected to this topic, as well as solid knowledge and experience. One persistent argument against the efficacy of EIA in developing nations is that the procedure and quality differ from country to country. The International Aid Agencies (IAA) have their guidelines for protecting the environment while following local environmental assessment standards for any financing requirements. IAA involvement in the EIA process might significantly affect how well-written EIA reports are. To evaluate the assessment quality, six EIA reports from state-financed development projects (SL-EIAs) and another six development projects EIAs funded by the IAA (IAA-EIAs) in Sri Lanka were randomly chosen. LeeCooley review package (1990) was used to evaluate the Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) of each EIA. In this investigation, it was discovered that IAA-EIAs and SL-EIAs had a significant difference in overall quality. IAA-EIAs show values that range from highly satisfactory to satisfactory and each share 50 percent, whereas SL-EIAs indicate 83% satisfactory and 17 % of borderline quality. In comparison to the SL-EIAs, all four review areas of the IAA-EIAs performed notably well. While the SL-EIA shows good to borderline quality (0.66-0.72), all evaluated IAA-EIA reports reveal highly satisfactory to satisfactory (0.81-0.93) quality. The engagement of IAA in the environmental assessment has a considerable impact to improve assessment quality in comparison to the only domestic assessment. Finding the weak area in the SL-EIA process and adhering to the IAA standards would elevate the standard of the report.

MECHANICS OF SHOALING AT THE HOUSTON SHIP CHANNEL’S BAYPORT FLARE

The Houston Ship Channel (HSC) is one of the most vital and busiest deep-draft navigation channels in the United States. In 2019 in partnership with the Port of Houston, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Galveston District (SWG) completed a five-year award-winning mega feasibility study for the HSC Engineering Channel Improvement Project (ECIP). As part of the 2019 HSC ECIP Feasibility Report Environmental Impact Statement (FREIS) and, through ongoing and repeated maintenance events, the Bayport Flare (Flare) was noted as an area of concern due to chronic shoaling that disrupts traffic and requires continuous dredging. The Flare is the intersection of the HSC and Bayport Ship Channel (BSC). This study seeks to (1) improve our understanding of the source and mechanisms for generation of shoaling and (2) develop and assess conceptual alternative countermeasures for shoaling mitigation. To assess and isolate the sources and mechanics of shoaling in the Flare, a multiple layer approach was applied, which included both field and numerical investigations. A workshop was held to develop alternative countermeasures based on the understanding of system dynamics. Alternatives will (1) be optimized based on cost-benefit considerations; (2) have no-adverse impact on navigation nor require revision, to the point practicable, of ongoing ship simulation studies; and (3) may be structural, non-structural or OandM based.

Lessons learned from 30-years of operation of the Caernarvon Freshwater Diversion, Louisiana USA

Wetland loss is a worldwide issue with estimates of loss ranging from 50% to 71% in the 20th century. Louisiana's coastal zone lost approximately 4,830 km2, or 25% of the land area between 1932 and 2016 due to a variety of natural and anthropogenic forces that both erode and prevent the growth or maintenance of existing land. Freshwater diversions were constructed along the Mississippi River to convey freshwater, nutrients, and sediment from the Mississippi River to Louisiana's coastal basins to combat saltwater intrusion, nourish the marshes, and stimulate fisheries. The Caernarvon Freshwater Diversion (CFD) was authorized by the Flood Control Acts of 1928 and 1965, the 1974 Water Resources Development Act, and a 1984 Environmental Impact Statement, with construction completed and operations started in 1991. The CFD has been largely successful from the standpoint of the project's authorized goals. Early on in the project, the CFD helped combat saltwater intrusion in a 2,730 km2 basin and re-established the gradient from fresh to salt marsh, by creating conditions favorable to fresh marsh species. Although not a specific project goal, the CFD also built more than 700 acres of new emergent wetland between 1991 and 2016. By critically assessing 30 years of CFD governance, operations, monitoring, and adaptive management, lessons learned are developed that provide valuable information for making the operations and governance of current and future diversions more effective, transparent, adaptive, and trusted by the basin communities. Louisiana's Coastal Master Plan pivots to the use of river diversions to focus on land building and large-scale ecosystem restoration by mimicking natural processes that originally built the Louisiana deltaic landscape, rather than the more common small-scale restoration that has occurred over the past decades. However, large-scale restoration projects, by their nature, impact a wide variety of stakeholders and tend to cross political boundaries. Lessons learned from the CDF highlight the need for flexibility in the long-term and specificity in the short term in governing the operations of a large-scale coastal project. Recommendations developed for modernizing project implementation into the future given changing estuaries and climate will help increase effective implementation of larger-capacity river sediment diversions and other ecosystem-scale projects. It is time for big and bold action to restore south Louisiana and other coastal environments worldwide, and critical to success is using results from numerous past studies, applying lessons learned from existing projects like the CFD, and projections of future conditions.

Understanding stakeholder experiences with visual communication in environmental impact assessment

Visual communication is widely and commonly used in environmental impact assessment (EIA) practice by all stakeholders. It includes maps, photographs, tables, info-graphics and other images used in environmental impact statements, as well as videos and graphics in online materials or in face-to-face consultation sessions (e.g., posters and PowerPoint presentations). The purpose of this research was to understand the practice of visual communication in EIA, focusing upon the perceptions and experiences of stakeholders. Surveys were conducted with international EIA practitioners along with observations of consultation sessions for three EIA projects in Portugal and interviews with proponents, regulators and members of the public involved. Specific focus was on (i) understanding stakeholder perspectives on the advantages and disadvantages of visual communication in EIA; (ii) proponent perceptions about the creation and use of visual communication; and (iii) public perceptions regarding their understanding and experience of visual communication as recipients of this material during public engagement in EIA. The mode and content of presentation, visual literacy of stakeholders and technical arrangements interact to determine the efficacy of visual communication. All stakeholders expected visual communication to be employed in EIA, but proponents and public were found to have low visual literacy. Proponents had pre-conceived notions for visual communication, without considering the needs of their audience, resulting in complex content being delivered inappropriately – too fast, without opportunity for reflection and dialogue. Frustrated public recipients tended to distrust proponents and be opposed to their projects, an unintended emotional response arising from cognition challenges with visual communication, combined with insufficient time for explanation, interpretation, and dialogue. This paper seeks to trigger reflection by practitioners and researchers on how and by whom visual communication in EIA should be designed, and what inhibits their comprehension and understanding. Considering visual literacy levels of EIA stakeholdersand tailoring the mode and style of delivery accordingly is critical for effective visual communication.

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of CPEC road project by following EIA index approach for sustainability

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a framework to provide all the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of mega projects for sustainability. Section 12 of Pakistan Environmental Protection Act (PEPA) 1997 regulates EIA procedure for mega projects that need to be approved by the respective Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reduce environmental impacts. This study identified inadequacies linked with EIA procedures of CPEC western road project initiated from Rehmani Khel to Kot Balian (package-2A). To evaluate EIA procedures for the selected road project, an EIA index has been formulated based on questionnaire responses. The respondents of this study included environmental experts, social experts, and consultants from the relevant departments. The secondary sources involved a comprehensive literature review and approved EIA reports of CPEC road project. For testing variables, statistical analysis, i.e., the gamma test, correlation analysis, and factor analysis were used. The current study revealed the environmental impacts of CPEC road project, i.e., vehicle emissions, land degradation, loss of biodiversity, and atmospheric pollution. The calculated EIA index was 0.47, which identified the deficiencies among EIA stages, i.e., environmental management efficiency index, environmental impact statement index (EISI), and mitigation index for selected road projects. Statistical analysis indicated an insignificant relationship among the variables for environmental sustainability for the road project. This study will provide an EIA index for implementation of EIA procedures to reduce environmental degradation and contribute to EIA literature for long-term sustainability.

Addressing structural hurdles for metadata extraction from environmental impact statements

AbstractNatural language processing techniques can be used to analyze the linguistic content of a document to extract missing pieces of metadata. However, accurate metadata extraction may not depend solely on the linguistics, but also on structural problems such as extremely large documents, unordered multi‐file documents, and inconsistency in manually labeled metadata. In this work, we start from two standard machine learning solutions to extract pieces of metadata from Environmental Impact Statements, environmental policy documents that are regularly produced under the US National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. We present a series of experiments where we evaluate how these standard approaches are affected by different issues derived from real‐world data. We find that metadata extraction can be strongly influenced by nonlinguistic factors such as document length and volume ordering and that the standard machine learning solutions often do not scale well to long documents. We demonstrate how such solutions can be better adapted to these scenarios, and conclude with suggestions for other NLP practitioners cataloging large document collections.

Contramedidas en Cabo Pulmo: La ciencia y la judicialización de conflictos ambientales en México

AbstractThe judicialization of environmental conflicts in Mexico has generated a growing demand for legal evidence of environmental damages and risks to ecosystems and communities. When conflicts arise over large development projects, one opposition strategy consists of denouncing errors in a project's Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) or procedural errors in its evaluation by federal authorities. Volunteer scientists collaborate with local communities and nonprofit organizations to diagnose technical errors in the EIS and develop “countermeasures” of risks that can be used to contest projects in court. This article analyzes a paradigmatic case of independent EIS review that occurred to oppose a tourism megadevelopment project adjoining the Cabo Pulmo National Marine Park in Baja California Sur. Confronted with the contraction of the political sphere in Mexico, this administrative tactic of political struggle appears as a viable alternative to directly challenging powerful elites. The Cabo Pulmo case highlights evolving relationships between science, environmental governance, and emergent forms of political mobilization in Latin America.

A cross-section from the consumer perspective on sustainable nutrition: consumer awareness and motivation status.

Sustainable diets and food production systems are important for healthy life and future generations. This goal should be reachable by consumer motivations. The study aim is the evaluation of awareness and knowledge of sustainability and logo/claims related with sustainability.Participants' knowledge about sustainability definition and logos/claims related to sustainability were assessed by an online-questionnaire. The questionnaire involved the calculation of annual dietary carbon emissions (kg), nitrogen waste (g), and water consumption (L).Four hundred-two volunteers participated in the study (male: 24.9%; female: 75.1). Only 44 participants (10.9%) explained what sustainable nutrition definition, correctly. The rates of knowledge about logos were quite low; 29.4% for organic product logo; 26.6% for Good farming practice logo; 86.1% for Recycle logo; and 8.0% for Eco-label logo, respectively. The education status of participants affected to knowledge of logo/claim ratio (p < 0.05). Ethic production and environmental impact statement information were care of participants' ratio of 33.6% and 34.1%, respectively. The mean dietary carbon emission of participants was 551.0 ± 343.6kg/year, which was 81% of the upper limit (680kg/year). The mean nitrogen waste was 3238.8 ± 4620.9g/year and mean water consumption was 91,538.7 ± 157,537.9 L/year. Mediterranean diet model carbon emission and nitrogen waste were higher than other diet models, omnivore diet models had more water consumption than other diet models. But these differences were not found statistically significant (p > 0.05).Sustainable nutrition can be achieved via consumers' awareness. Food industry and government should encourage the people about promotion of sustainable food preferences.

Design-build noise policy - what's fair?

The New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) is implementing a design-build delivery process on projects involving noise barriers that requires design-builders to provide Final TNM design year with noise barrier noise levels that are equal to or less than the corresponding Preliminary TNM design year with noise barrier noise levels determined in the NEPA environmental document. The NYSDOTs first use of the design-build delivery method was the $3.9B New NY Bridge project implemented by the New York State Thruway Authority (NYSTA). That project included a significant investment in noise barriers on the Rockland Landing. The New NY Bridge (NNYB) project served as a test case at a time when a well-developed design-build noise policy did not exist. In the absence of a definitive design-build noise policy, the noise barriers originally offered by the design-builder, while providing significant noise reductions, failed to meet all the environmental commitments made to all benefitted receivers as documented in the Final Environmental Impact Statement and Record of Decision (FEIS/ROD). Working with FHWA and NYSDOT, the NYSTA reached agreement with the design-builder to construct noise barriers that provided the same future design year with noise barrier noise levels that were provided in the noise study that supported the FEIS/ROD. Since construction of the New NY

Slope stability assessment of some waste rock dumps at a typical gold mine in Ghana

Mining results in both economic and uneconomic materials being generated. The uneconomic materials (wastes) are stacked in a convenient place for further use or stored permanently as a slope or embankment. In Ghana, a typical gold mine set up dumping sites to accommodate the waste generated from its operations. Samples were collected from three waste dumps and tested in the laboratory, and the parameters obtained were used as input for 2D model development. The Factor of Safety (FS) of the three waste dumps were determined using the Janbu Generalised slope stability analysis method. Path and slope surface (circular and non-circular) search methods were used for the three cases. The FS for the waste dumps were determined and ranged from 1.61-2.74, 1.49- 2.50 and 1.32-2.10 under dry, static and pseudo-static loading conditions, respectively. These values exceed the minimum requirements of 1.1-1.5 for stability conditions. The geometry of the waste dumps, Suraw Waste Dump (SWD), is within the standard and hence, does not require reshaping, while the slope angles for the remaining waste dumps, Tano Waste Dump (TWD) and Akoti Waste Dump (AWD) need to be reshaped to achieve the proposed slope angle of 3H:1V (18.40 degrees) as stipulated in the mine’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).