ENVIRONMENTAL CONTAMINATION ON FORMER MILITARY SITES AND HAZARDS TO THE DRINKING WATER IN GERMANY

Abstract

An assessment concept was developed accordingly to the claims of “Vorsorge” (precaution) of the drinking water hygiene, which authorise a prospective evaluation of potential environmental contamination. The problematic is represented by the example of military contaminated sites in Germany and generalised by an adequate and extensive system of assessment for soils and waters. Over the description of substance properties of the environmental contaminants, values of substance characteristics (SC-Values) will be calculated. The combination of different values of substance characteristics shows a potential exposition and health risk over the drinking water path. The identification of hazards is presented, in a second step, with explicit health related guidance values (GV) and in form of measure values (short term health related guidance values GV_SE)¹ in the context of human toxicological assessments. Another approach is the calculation of permissible bearable maximum concentrations (BMC) through an aqua toxicological evaluation. With these two concentrations - the human-tox and the aqua-tox derivated - values, one can decide on the fact whether the chemical quality