Procedures for addressing uncertainty and variability in exposure to characterize potential health risk from trichloroethylene contaminated groundwater at Beale Air Force Base in California

This study was designed to accomplish two objectives. The first was to provide to the US Air Force and the regulatory community quantitative procedures that they might want to consider using for addressing uncertainty and variability in exposure to better characterize potential health risk. Such methods could be used at sites where populations may now or in the future be faced with using groundwater contaminated with low concentrations of the chemical trichloroethylene (TCE). The second was to illustrate and explain the application of these procedures with respect to available data for TCE in ground water beneath an inactive landfill site that is undergoing remediation at Beale Air Force Base in California. The results from this illustration provide more detail than the more traditional conservative deterministic, screening-level calculations of risk, also computed for purposes of comparison. Application of the procedures described in this report can lead to more reasonable and equitable risk-acceptability criteria for potentially exposed populations at specific sites