Pedagogical junction
If this were a classroom course, you would have textbooks. At some point I would open my book and point out graphs and tables and other details that are in the textbook, are important, but just can't be gone over in class. I need to do that here. There are many books and pamphlets that address exposure assessment. Many consultants have checklists they use to make sure they are considering all the possibilities. "RAGS," Risk Assessment Guidance for Superfund, is a benchmark EPA publication. RAGS Volume A., Chapter 6, Exposure Assessment, is the best chapter in that book, in my opinion. The text is only 22 pages, quickly downloadable. The tables and illustrations are in longer files. Because RAGS is specific for Superfund, it has some Superfund specific verbiage and approaches a few things a little differently that you might if it were not a Superfund site. Here is the URL for RAGS A . Some of the material in Chapter 6 we will get to next week, but for this module I would like to point out from RAGS A:
Exhibit 6-3 Common Chemical Release Sources at Sites....
Exhibit 6-5 Important Consideration for Determining the Environmental Fate and Transport [of chemicals]
Exhibit 6-6 (which spans several pages) Flow Chart(s) for Fate and Transport Assessments,
Exhibit 6-7 Matrix of Potential Exposure Routes
Exhibit 6-8 Example of Table Format for Summarizing Complete Exposure Pathways at a Site.
All are important. Glance through them. They are in a pretty ragged resolution, but that's all you can get for free. You may want to save them to your local drive.
(If you get lost at the EPA site, here is a direct link to the download. Note, it is in some sort of draft mode with comments. https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-09/documents/rags_a.pdf