Development Agency Reclaims Toxic Waste Site for New Community

Engineering Management Solutions for Controlling EPA Superfund Data Proliferation

Global Archives’ customers in the engineering services industry include public and private organizations who rely upon accurate, up-to-the-minute data sources to efficiently run programs while complying with the EPA SuperFund’s formidable regulations.

Global Archives was selected by the City of Irvine Redevelopment Agency to convert, analyze and organize the repository of data into a meaningful data library that users could easily access and find key documents based upon content or key metadata. The primary engine for this library is LockBox, equipped with specific procedures that enable users in multiple sites to conduct key word and content searches.

The Environmental Protection Agency oversees an estimated 2,600 designated Superfund cleanup sites nationwide. The former El Toro Naval Air Station in the city of Irvine, California is one Superfund site. El Toro’s 4,700 acres are designated by the city of Irvine for planned, phased redevelopment and will ultimately contain several thousand housing units and commercial and industrial zones.

Before this, though, a massive cleanup and remediation are required to recover the land from over 60 years of environmental compromise. Teams of public and private agencies, environmental consultants, real estate developers, architects, engineers, and building contractors, are on the job to reclaim, remediate, rezone and redevelop the El Toro land.

These efforts include large-scale drawings, test results, and policies and procedures to be followed during the redevelopment of this prime southern California land. The repository of this data collection alone contains over 500,000 documents, maps, drawings and reports. The challenge is a common problem for any Superfund cleanup site: reining in massive amounts of documents — created at considerable investment to the taxpayer — and organizing this repository into a meaningful, scalable and shareable user library. These publicly funded investments are the roadmaps to restoration of the site.

Ensuring Data Management Cost Savings and Versatile Search Functions

Global Archives recommended a pilot program using LockBox based upon proven success with other comparable field installments. First, a “step-by-step” process was enacted to minimize disruption of daily operations.

Using a custom-built, OCR engine to scrape data from the documents, Global Archives built a reference table that included several key metadata fields, including document type, approximate number of pages, processed dates, EPA category, author, document recipient, subject, site location, and pertinent engineering information.

In addition, all of the documents (except engineering drawings) were made OCR-searchable for content. In this way, a user could search by key metadata, i.e., by author and “runway,” and retrieve all documents.

The project was completed on time and user acceptance has been good.

“Global Archives took on an impossible task, made sense out of the document storeroom, brought in the necessary equipment and staff and completed the job on time and on budget.” - Jill M. Schoener, Municipal Records Administrator, City of Irvine.

In work environments where in strict adherence to cost guidelines and data security are of utmost concern (and subject to industry and governmental regulation), Global Archives offers proven success in data governance for very large scale engineering data management.