HUMAN EXPOSURE TO PCBS - MODELING AND ASSESSMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONCENTRATIONS ON THE AKWESASNE RESERVATION

The Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne, comprised of approximately 10,000 peop le, is located along the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York. The A kwesasne reservation has been contaminated by local industries, which are located on the St. Lawrence River and its tributaries, and by upst ream sources on the Great Lakes. The closest known source of contamina tion to the reservation is General Motors (GM) Foundry, which is locat ed less than 100 feet from the reservation's border. This facility is listed on the Environmental Protection Agency's National Priority List and the New York State's Department of Environmental Conservation's ( NYSDEC) inactive hazardous waste disposal site list. Contamination to the reservation arising from discharge and secondary transport mechani sms has caused concern to the Mohawk people of Akwesasne. The characte rization of the environment at Akwesasne required a historical review of existing environmental data, generation of a database, review of ex isting data, sampling to augment existing data, data analysis, data mo deling and data generation based on a chosen model for all environment al pathways of interest. The objectives this work were to: 1) assess t he quality of existing data, 2) create a database which will manage th e over 6000 samples recorded taken from the local area, 3) augment the existing data with additional sampling, 4) determine the degradation or attenuation of PCBs and specific congeners in various environmental media over time, and 5) create a model that estimates environmental c oncentrations of PCBs retro- and pro-spectively for times that samplin g had not occurred. The results of this process yielded concentrations of PCBs, congener specific and total, in several environmental medium . Modeling of environmental concentrations through a thirteen-year tim e period was performed for a fish, wildlife and surface soil. Other me dia were not modeled due to limited information or non-detectable conc entrations reported in past work. Additionally, the study participants activity, consumption and residential information was considered when limiting this modeling effort. The results of this work were used to estimate environmental concentrations through time and space. The resu lts of this work were extremely valuable when determining areas of con cern and provided the basis for a detailed exposure assessment of 97 w omen who reside at the Reservation.