1) Introductions - some new attendees were present at the meeting, including John Verduin and Steve Cappellino of Anchor Environmental.  John will be leading the aquatic capping task and Steve will be overseeing the cement stabilization, sediment blending and sediment washing tasks.  See the attached sign-in sheet for a complete list of the meeting attendees.

2) Pilot Project Updates - Tom Wang started by presenting an overview of the various pilot projects, including the currently proposed schedule. Sampling was initiated almost two weeks after the date presented on the previous schedule.  The goal is to make up the time during the design phase. Tom also mentioned that the two EAs (capping and cement stabilization) have been submitted to the Corps for internal review and that they should be released for external review by March 8th.  John then provided an update on the capping study and Steve provided a status report on the other options.  The details of these summaries are presented below.

Capping: Tom mentioned that site characterization sampling has been completed at the LA River, NEIBP and SEIBP locations for physical and chemical properties.  Sediment sampling for the cement stabilization and other bench scale tests will be conducted at a later date.  Sampling at the LA River site was uneventful; however, field observations indicate that the target dredge area consists of 4-8 feet of sand overlying a layer of fine silt, which suggest that the sediments may contain low contaminant concentrations.  Problems have developed at the NEIBP where a water pipeline was discovered running east/west from Island White to the shore.  The pipeline appears to lie just on the edge of the target disposal area.  Tom stated that this was too close to allow safe disposal of the dredge material so Anchor is working with staff from Everest International to evaluate other disposal areas within the same pit, but away from the pipeline.  Some of these areas may hold less than the targeted dredge amount of 100,000 CY so we will need to flexible in the final removal amount.   John then provided a quick update on the dredge design approach and current status.

Cement Stabilization: Moffatt and Nichol prepared a cost estimate of the currently scoped design for the bench scale test and the costs were too high (over $200,000 for the analytical leaching tests).  Therefore, a conference call was held to discuss an alternative approach.  Russ Boudreau then presented an overview of the proposed new approach, which uses a total of 9 mixes (3 each of cement, fly ash and kiln dust), all of which are readily available in southern California.  Russ stated that the new approach would be tiered so that they use the physical tests (which are much cheaper than the leaching tests) to select the most appropriate blend, then conduct the leaching tests on the limited number of samples to reduce costs.

Sediment Blending: The current thought is to design a bench scale

study that does not use dredge material, but instead relies on commercially available materials to generate some strength performance curves which could then be applied to a wide range of sediment types throughout the area.  Rick Cameron from the Port of Long Beach and ? from the Port of LA were confused about the need for this project as they do not feel that the ports would ever actually blend (i.e., take dredged sediments and mix them with other material [such as other dredged sediment or imported material] to make them more structurally stable) - they would just avoid using them.  Jim Fields mentioned that the idea here was to develop performance curves that might give more confidence to Ports or other entities to use soft dredged material

to provide an alternative to open water or upland landfill disposal.  The port's representatives also mentioned that they had some data available from recent projects that showed what it would take to structurally stabilize dredge material.  It was decided that Anchor would set up a meeting with the Port's engineers to discuss what data they had and what structural properties would be needed for fill material so that the study can be geared to provide them a useful product.

Sediment Washing: Trudy Olin-Estes from WES is working with Anchor to develop a workplan for a sediment washing study.  It is undecided who will conduct the work - WES or an outside vendor - but the study will focus on chloride removal and also evaluate residual chemistry as a secondary effect.  This idea was evaluated in the Bay area a few years back, but never progressed to a bench scale study as they decided that the material could be better used for constructing tidally-influenced wetlands.

3) Dredge Monitoring Program - Tom mentioned that Anchor should have an internal draft of the monitoring plan ready for review by end of Feb and that it will be included in the draft EA on March 8th.  The monitoring plan will cover dredging, placement, and post-placement.  Long term monitoring will be discussed; however, there is currently no budget at the Corps for this phase of the project.  Michael Lyons asked if there were plans to sample for the presence of ghost shrimp outside of the disposal pit.  Tom stated that this was not in the current plan but specifics of the monitoring plan will be developed with CSTF input.  The Port representative mentioned that they have currently approved monitoring plans for their dredge programs and suggested that some of the data might be useful for the current program. Tom mentioned that one change that is proposed is to use light transmissivity instead of turbidity for evaluating water quality criteria compliance.  The Port of Long Beach has recently used this approach with approval of LARWQCB.   The Port of LA has also just received permits for four small projects with similar monitoring requirements.  It was also mentioned that the Port of Oakland has data specifically related to TSS monitoring.  Several folks suggested that we have a separate meeting just to discuss the details of the monitoring program, including the costs.

Tentative date for a presentation of the monitoring plan by Anchor was the 4th Tuesday in March (3/27).  The estimated costs for the long-term monitoring would also be needed, especially if the CSTF was asked to fund portions or all of it.  

4) Control Measures for Dredging and Disposal Operations - Steven

Bay from SCCWRP mentioned that his group has funding to conduct seven tasks for special studies, including BMPs associated with dredging.  The deadline for completing the tasks is November of 2001.  At this time he is proposing two phases for the dredging BMP study. The first phase would be a literature search on the relationship between TSS, turbidity and contaminant releases and the second phase would be possibly conducting a combination of lab and field studies to verify the results.  Haley Lovan from the Corps has a contract with the Chambers group to conduct a similar literature search (as part of the Marina del Rey project), though it is a relatively simple literature search.  It was decided to wait until the Chambers report was completed, then use this project to expand the work that they complete.  In the interim, Steven Bay will begin developing an RFP focusing on the following goals:  

 - Is it a problem?

 - If so, what are some reasonable BMPs?

 - What are the appropriate criteria?

Steve Bay has asked for comments on the draft scope of work he presented at the meeting.

5) Select a Meeting Schedule:  It was decided that the meetings would be held on the 4th Tuesday of each month at least until the project was completed.  The next meeting will be on March 27th from 10-12 at the same location.