Road-deposited sediments in an urban environment: A first look at sequentially extracted element loads in grain size fractions.

Sediments stored in urban drainage basins are important environmental archives for assessing contamination. Few studies have examined the geochemical fractionation of metals in individual grain size classes of solid environmental media. This is the first study of road sediments to quantify the mass loading of Al, Cu, Pb, and Zn in individual grain size classes (<63μm to 1000-2000μm) and partition contributions amongst four sequentially extracted fractions (acid extractable, reducible, oxidizable, and residual). The optimized BCR sequential extraction procedure was applied to road sediments from Palolo Valley, Oahu, Hawaii. Road sediments from this non-industrialized drainage basin exhibited significant enrichment in Cu, Pb, and Zn. Metal mass loading results indicate that the <63μm grain size class dominated almost all fraction loads for a given element. The residual fraction dominated the Al loading for this geogenic element. The reducible fraction, associated with Fe and Mn oxides, was the most important component for Cu, Pb, and Zn loading. These results have direct implications for environmental planners charged with reducing sediment-associated contaminant transport in urbanized drainage basins.