Stimulating biological activity within fractured soil at Klucewo, Poland

Petroleum products, principally jet fuel and also aviation gasoline, contaminate glacial tills across the surface of the Klucewo air base, which served as a keystone in military operations during eight decades of the 20th century. The clayey matrix retains contaminants even though most of the spilled fuel has long since percolated through the natural vertical fractures to the underlying sandy aquifer, where ongoing recovery operations minimize the threat to water supplies of northwestern Poland. However, the till serves as a chronic source of groundwater contamination, and dual porosity characteristics of the soil impose technical challenges upon remediation process that are shared by sites around the world. The fractures created at Klucewo serve to support environmental recovery at the base and provide a platform for fundamental investigations of remediation in fractured soil. This larger scale project seeks to provide guidance for the selection and economical operation of remediation processes in complex settings. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the 8th International In Situ and On-Site Bioremediation Symposium (Baltimore, MD 6/6-9/2005).