Where does the landowner start?
For purposes of generating discussion, I’m a landowner.
Maybe….I bought a manufacturing company that had been operating for years. Once I took control, I found out the previous owner had been allowing contaminants to seep into the slab of my building and possibly to affect soil and/or groundwater.
Or maybe…..I’ve owned a manufacturing company for years and that pesky shop foreman has bothered me once too many times about the leaky fuel tank out back. I’m going to look into it once and for all to make him stop complaining.
Question: Where do I start? Should I call the City…what department? Should I call the County….what department? Should I call an environmentalist? Should I call that divorce attorney I met at the club? Or should I just rent a backhoe and start digging around out back to see what the problem is?
Question: Are you with the City or the County or a law firm or a consulting firm, or somewhere else? What are your thoughts on where my first call should be?
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on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 7:49 pm and is filed under ●Brownfields Fed, State & Local Government, ●Environmental Agencies, ●Environmental Community, ●Environmental Engineering.
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June 13th, 2007 at 11:11 am
A divorce lawyer? I don’t think so.
Why not try the more obvious route and contact a qualified environmental consultant who has a good reputation for solving problems such as this.
My advice would be to proceed cautiously by carefully interviewing the plant personnel to get a better knowledge of past and current chemical usages and then proceeding to perform a limited surface and subsurface soil and /or soil gas investigation as an initial effort to get a handle on the problem. This investigation would preferably be performed under contract with the client’s environmental attorney so that the data is confidential.
If the contamination is a “reportable” event(again, ask your attorney), then you would need to select a regulatory agency to report the findings. This is not always discretionary but it may be and that could be the beginning of a nightmare is you select the wrong agency. If you want more advice on this latter issue, I’d rather discuss it on the phone(562-857-1685)
June 14th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Ken, I was just injecting some brownfield humor with the comment about the divorce attorney; that’s an exaggeration but the point is not everyone knows where to start. FANTASTIC ADVICE about hiring the consultant through an attorney so that the data is confidential, and also about the possibility of being able to select your regulatory agency of choice. Readers - keep these suggestions in your brownfield file - they might save you alot of heartache in the future. Ken, Thanks for your very helpful comments, I will call to discuss further.