A Computer Program for Conducting Incinerator Risk Assessments

ABSTRACT

“This research was supported in part by an appointment to the Postgraduate Internship Program at the U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education through an interagency agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy and USACHPPM.”

In 1994, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) developed a screening methodology for conducting indirect exposure risk assessments for combustion facilities. The United States Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine currently utilizes this methodology in conjunction with other USEPA guidance documents to perform human health risk assessments (HHRAs). The HHRAs require the development of complex human health models using spreadsheet software packages which estimate various media concentrations of contaminants in the environment. Since the quality assurance/quality control procedures associated with verifying the model's results are extremely time consuming, a computer program was developed using Microsoft Excef to minimize the amount of time needed. This discussion describes the 6 steps taken in developing this computer program, which are: (1) understanding the problem; (2) establishing the structure of each table in the spreadsheets; (3) developing an algorithm to solve the problem; (4) writing code; (5) running the program; and (6) testing the results. The automated process of having the computer predict health risk and hazards for each potentially exposed individual saves a tremendous amount of time because each calculated value is placed in the correct spreadsheet cell location. In addition to the time needed to develop human health spreadsheets, this program also minimizes the potential for reducing human error.