Battelle has been awarded a five-year, $13 million contract with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to evaluate the performance of homeland security technologies related to water protection and wide-area decontamination.
The EPA has been designated as the sector-specific agency for drinking water and wastewater critical infrastructure protection and is the lead federal agency for the remediation of areas contaminated by terrorist events involving the release of biological organisms, biotoxins, chemical warfare agents, toxic industrial chemicals, toxic industrial materials and radiological materials. EPA homeland security research provides procedures and methods that would assist EPA and other responders in the detection and containment of contamination, and in the remediation of sites following terrorist attacks.
Battelle Program Manager Karen Riggs said she is pleased that Battelle will continue to support EPA in this mission area.
“We established a successful framework for technology testing and evaluation for the agency in 1997, and we have continued to build on that framework with several major programs, including this new contract,” Riggs said.
The new contract follows Battelle’s successful management of the predecessor contract. Under the new contract, Battelle will continue to test, evaluate and report on the performance of the technologies, including decontamination/surface cleaning of wide areas; analytical techniques for continuous measurement of fumigant chemicals; and decontamination of drinking water distribution systems and wastewater treatment plants.
Other efforts under the contract include managing established stakeholder groups and technical panels, establishing and maintaining a continuous project information dissemination and diffusion capability and developing standards that can be used by others to test and evaluate technologies.
Source: Battelle
