Omar Félix

SRK consulting · Department of Environmental Engineering

The overall project objective at the Iron King Mine Superfund site is to determine the level and potential risk associated with heavy metal exposure of the proximate population emanating from the site's tailings pile. To provide sufficient size-fractioned dust for multi-discipline research studies, a dust generator was built and is now being used t...

Wind erosion, transport and deposition of windblown dust from anthropogenic sources, such as mine tailings impoundments, can have significant effects on the surrounding environment. The lack of vegetation and the vertical protrusion of the mine tailings above the neighboring terrain make the tailings susceptible to wind erosion. Modeling the erosio...

Mine tailings impoundments in arid and semiarid environments are susceptible to wind erosion due to their fine grain silt and sandy composition and lack of vegetative coverage. Aeolian transport of particulate matter from these mine tailings impoundments are potential hazards to human health due to the presence of metal and metalloid contaminants....

The particle size distribution of mine tailings material has a major impact on the atmospheric transport of metal and metalloid contaminants by dust. Implications to human health should be assessed through a holistic size-resolved characterization involving multidisciplinary research, which requires large uniform samples of dust that are difficult...

Mining operations are potential sources of airborne particulate metal and metalloid contaminants through both direct smelter emissions and wind erosion of mine tailings. The warmer, drier conditions predicted for the Southwestern US by climate models may make contaminated atmospheric dust and aerosols increasingly important, due to potential delete...

Atmospheric particulate have deleterious impacts on human health. Predicting dust and aerosol emission and transport would be helpful to reduce harmful impacts but, despite numerous studies, prediction of dust events and contaminant transport in dust remains challenging. In this work, we show that relative humidity and wind speed are both determina...

Abstract Mining operations are potential sources of airborne particulate metal and metalloid contaminants through both direct smelter emissions and wind erosion of mine tailings. The warmer, drier conditions predicted for the Southwestern US by climate models may make contaminated atmospheric dust and aerosols increasingly important, due to potenti...

Background/Question/Methods Aeolian and fluvial processes are fundamental drivers of earth surface dynamics and play an important role in the redistribution of sediment, nutrients, and contaminants. Projected increases in both land-use intensity and drought frequency for many arid and semiarid environments are likely to alter land-surface dynamic...

Mining operations are potential sources of airborne metal and metalloid contaminants through both direct smelter emissions and wind erosion of mine tailings. The warmer, drier conditions predicted for the Southwestern US by climate models may make contaminated atmospheric dust and aerosols increasingly important, with potential deleterious effects...

Particle less than 10 microns (PM10) in the atmosphere are potentially responsible of several health effects (Furusjö et al., 2007). The main source of PM10 in urban areas is the traffic of vehicles, especially when they drive through unpaved roads (UR) causing that some particles of the ground suspend, facilitating its transport through wind. Unti...