Practical Program Evaluations: Getting From Ideas to Outcomes by Gerald Andrews Emison

Author:Gerald Andrews Emison [Emison, Gerald Andrews]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Affairs & Administration, General
ISBN: 9781483370934
Google: pgimAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: CQ Press
Published: 2006-09-07T12:49:26+00:00

The Case of the Incineration at Sea Program Proposal

The value of simple characterization in an analysis occurred during an evaluation of the program to advocate incinerating hazardous wastes on sea-borne vessels. The disposal of hazardous wastes is technically difficult, costly, and politically difficult. This last feature derives from the Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) syndrome: No one wants wastes near his or her neighborhood. A way around the NIMBY problem was advanced in the early 1980s, which was to build state-of-the-art hazardous wastes incinerators on ships, load the wastes onto the vessels, sail them to international waters where there are no backyards, and incinerate them there.

A pilot test burn had been conducted that showed such combustion operations would render the wastes inert. An evaluation of the program was sought, and the environmental analysis division of the State of Fremont’s Department of Environmental Quality examined the program. By simple mathematics, the team demonstrated that the number of ships required to incinerate the hazardous wastes would be staggering. When that insight was combined with the number of loading facilities that would be required to handle the waste, the national policy makers concluded that incineration at sea was impractical. No complex modeling of the waste streams was necessary, although the modeling was readily available. A simple calculation of the future capacity required demonstrated the infeasible nature of the incineration at sea program. A straightforward description of the volume of waste and the facilities required to incinerate the waste brought everyone to conclude the approach would not work.

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