MONITORING SURVEYS AT THE FOUL AREA DISPOSAL SITE 

 FEBRUARY 1987 



1 . INTRODUCTION 



The Foul Area Disposal Site (FADS) is located in 

 Massachusetts Bay approximately 18 nautical miles (nm) 

 east-northeast of the entrance to Boston Harbor and 10 nm 

 south-southeast of Gloucester, Massachusetts. The site consists 

 of a circle with a 2 nm diameter centered about 42°25.7'N by 

 70°34.0'W. Located just west of Stellwagen Bank, the depths in 

 this site range from a minimum of approximately 58 meters in the 

 northeast quadrant on the edges of Stellwagen Bank, to a maximum 

 of 92 meters in a small depression in the southwest central 

 portion of the area. 



Prior to the establishment of the present disposal 

 site, the regional disposal area was known as the Boston Foul 

 Ground; this 2 nm diameter circle was centered approximately 0.75 

 nm west of the present site. This region of Massachusetts Bay 

 was been used as a disposal site for many years; the old site was 

 the recipient of many types of matter not limited to dredged 

 material, including building debris, canisters of industrial 

 wastes and encapsulated low-level nuclear waste. These items 

 were deposited on an almost continual basis over the past 4-5 

 decades; in 1977, the present location for FADS was established, 

 and disposal has been limited to dredged material only. Until 

 recently, control of disposal was accomplished using LORAN-C and 

 other less precise systems which resulted in many types of 

 disposed material being scattered over the entire western half of 

 the present site. During the past decade, use of this site has 

 increased, especially with the closing of the Boston Lightship 

 Disposal Site in 1976. Recent records indicate that the annual 

 average dredged material disposal volumes at this site exceed 

 300,000 cubic meters (400,000 cubic yards) of material, making it 

 the second most active site in New England surpassed only by the 

 Central Long Island Sound site. 



FADS is presently being considered for final 

 designation by the US Environmental Protection Agency and, to 

 assist in this effort, intensive studies have been conducted by 

 NED over the past three years. One important question is whether 

 a disposal mound can be formed in this depth of water using point 

 dumping at a taut-wire moored buoy. In order to address this 

 issue, a precision bathymetric survey was performed in the area 

 of the "DGD" disposal buoy to document the existing topography. 

 REMOTS® sediment profiling was also used to measure the thickness 

 of the flanks of the dredged material deposit. These data will 

 be used for comparison with later surveys. 



