R. Christopher Spicer, CIH, CSP, CHMM
I have more than forty years of experience in assessing and managing various general and occupational/indoor environmental issues particularly relevant to the insurance, legal, construction, and real estate communities.
Background Experience
- Personally conducted and designed/supervised hundreds of occupational and indoor environmental health and safety evaluations for various operations, circumstances, and building types throughout the United States.
- Experienced in claims/litigation support environment.
- Authored/co-authored more than sixty industry publications and presentations on the assessment, control, and remediation of indoor environmental contamination, including but not limited to asbestos, water/mold damage, post-fire/explosion residuals, and heavy metals.
- Particular interest and research have been in evaluating and interpreting environmental data in situations where no fixed numerical regulatory or guidance “levels” denote contamination or an unacceptable condition. Examples are buildings involving water damage, suspect mold (fungal) growth, suspect surface contamination from asbestos, lead, post-fire soot, etc. In these instances, test data is often utilized on a relative scale for comparison to a suitable control. However, direct comparison of laboratory-reported "numerical levels" within the traditional statistical approaches commonly employed often results in “false positive” and “false negative” indicators about the location and extent of "greater" contamination. The history and rationale of an alternative probability-based approach and the resulting implications for characterizing environmental impact, cause, origin, and remediation decisions have been the subject of my authored/co-authored peer-reviewed publications.
Peer Reviewed Technical Publications
June 2024
A Probabilistic Evaluation of Surface Loading and Concentration as Metrics for Post Structural Fire Assessment Soot Sampling Data (Fire Technology Vol. 60(4))
July 2020
Assessing background particulate contamination in a historic building – surface leads loading and contamination.
(Journal of Air and Waste Management Association 70(8), pp. 745-752)
February 2016
Permutation/Randomization-Based Inference for Environmental Data (Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Vol. 188 pp. 147 1-12)
July 2015
The Building Performance Model for Evaluating Bioaerosol Data from Suspect Indoor Environments
(Indoor & Built Environment Vol. 245(5) pp. 640-49)
May 2010
Differences in detection frequency as a Bioaerosol data criterion for evaluating suspect fungal contamination, (Building & Environment Vol. 45 pp. 1304-1311)
February 2008
Verifying Interpretive Criteria for Bioaerosol Data Using (Bootstrap) Monte Carlo Techniques
(Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene Vol.5 pp. 85-93)
May 2005
Establishing Site Specific Reference Levels for Fungi in Outdoor Air for Building Evaluation
(Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene Vol. 2 pp. 257-266)
August 2003
Bioaerosol Data Distribution: Probability and Implications for Sampling in Evaluating Problematic Buildings
(Applied Occupational and Environmental Hygiene Vol. 50 pp. 174-185)
September 2000
A Probability Model for Evaluating Building Contamination from an Environmental Event
(Journal of the Air and Waste Management Association Vol. 50 pp. 1637-1646)
May 2000
Limitations in Application of Spearman’s Rank Correlation to Bioaerosol Sampling Data
(American Industrial Hygiene Association Journal Vol. 61 pp.362-366)