Commingled Plumes
Plume can mean various things.
The word comes from Latin pluma, meaning small
soft feather.
Here are some eagle plumes. |
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A plume is also a feather or bunch of feathers worn as an ornament or a mark of
rank
(Picture courtesy
of Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library System) |
Or, a form that is like a long feather
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A plume is a space in air, water, or soil that contains
pollutants released from a point source.
The diagram below illustrates a plume of contaminants released from
a point source at ground level migrating downwards to groundwater and
carried downstream. See how the plume segregates into three phases:
liquid, vapor and dissolved particles.
The figures that follow are borrowed with permission from materials of “GORE™ Surveys,” a product and service provided by W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc., pioneering passive soil-gas survey technologies.
The colored spectral shapes represent two plumes of contaminants
in the groundwater originating from two distinctly separate point
sources; the ”hot” red cores being the likely points of
release.
The vertical scale of colors represents the intensity of the
contaminant levels, from the low level blue to the ultra high level
violet. The plumes reduce in intensity with distance from the
center. |
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Commingled Plume is the condition that exists where
contamination from two or more discrete releases have mixed or encroached
upon one another.
You can see here two different discharges to the groundwater
where the spreading plumes have met and mingled. |
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The situation below is even
more compounded with the commingling of 10 primal plumes.
Before one attempts remediation of a contamination case, and where
more than one point source is the cause, it is essential to gain complete
understanding of the origins of the various plumes. Engaging in remediation
without such complete understanding may prove costly at best and futile at
worst, because one may end up pulling plumes all over the place and
complicating the remedial effort to no end. |
