Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to spend more than a few hours on the topic must be met with skepticism,
and the rationale to address the issues in any detail should be fully justified.
Another technique to focus the effort is maximizing the use of senior
consultants. For many standard resources and sources of impact, individuals
with years of experience can be recruited to provide advice early in the proj-
ect planning. They have most likely dealt with the same issues in numerous
similar situations and know in advance, or think they know, within a rela-
tively narrow range, the full impact prediction and the environmental analy-
sis results. Sharing this prediction with the environmental analysis team can
provide very useful shortcuts and increase efficiency because starting with
an impact prediction to prove or disprove is very often an easier task than
starting with a blank sheet of paper. However, this technique must be used
with extreme caution and the following pitfalls must be avoided:
r The team members must still do the full analysis to confirm or mod-
ify the predictions and not rely blindly on the senior consultant's
prediction.
r The senior consultants are not being asked to do the analysis (which
is sometimes the tendency of technically oriented team members) but
just share their past experience. If the typically higher paid senior con-
sultant does the analysis, the drain on the budget will be more severe
and any efficiency gained from their prior experience could be lost.
r Senior consultants can make wrong predictions, and proving or
disproving them is an important and efficient outcome of this tech-
nique. The manager must avoid “bending” the full analysis to match
the early prediction intended to give guidance.
Conventional alternative (Section 4.5.3) and resource (Section 5.2.1) screen-
ing can be maximized early in the process to significantly reduce the scope of
evaluations and predictions required for the environmental analysis. It thus
constitutes another effective tool in increasing the efficiency and decreasing
the time required for the environmental analysis. Also establishing criteria
constituting a fatal flaw (such as economic viability or proximity to active
endangered species habitats) is a quick and efficient method of eliminating
an alternative before any environmental analysis effort or time is expended.
Another technique to enhance screening is an early side-by-side alternative
comparison, and when one alternative is found to be less advantageous than
another in at least one category and not more advantageous in any other cat-
egory, it can often be eliminated from further consideration. For example, for
the U.S. Coast Guard dry cargo residue management EIS, use of street sweep-
ers was found to be more expensive and operationally complex than using a
broom and shovel and provided no advantages. Thus it was eliminated from
detailed consideration before any effort or time was expended determining
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