Assessing the risk of contaminant spreading through sediment production in a tropical environment
Agricultural sites have been of great concern for decades due to rainfall-induced soildetachment and transport of sediment materials, and their associated chemicals and/ornutrients, away from those sites during wet days resulting in significant environmentalproblems. The same phenomena could also be expected from bare contaminated site exposedfor a long time before remediation. Exposed topsoil material which is disturbed by variousland operations is much more prone to erosion. All of these problems are more pronouncedwhen such land is situated in a tropical environment and especially during rainy seasons. Thisis because tropical storms are quite intense in nature, frequent and variable. Hence,contaminated sites in those regions should be given the same importance as agricultural landwhen addressing problems resulting from soil erosion. This paper attempts to highlight suchproblems through studying the impact of tropical monsoon data collected from India on therisk of soil erosion which could also be relevant to assessing risk of contaminant spreadingfrom surface soil through erosion and transportation of the detached material to downstream.The most well known and most frequently used soil loss model, the Revised Universal SoilLoss Equation 2 (RUSLE2), was used for that purpose. It was found that soil erosion in thisregion is very high and does go far beyond the threshold suggested by the USDA and that theerosion process is very much sensitive to the climatological variabilities.