Dirty work.

• Author: Nash, Betty Joyce
• Position: North Carolina environmental consultants

But somebody's got to do it. A whole new crew of lawyers and consultants are cleaning up, making sure pollution doesn't poison deals.

In 1989, Camel City Laundry Co. had a contract nearly sewed up to sell what was left of its Camel City Cleaners building and 1.5 adjacent acres in downtown Winston-Salem for $900,000.

But after a standard environmental review found a soup of toxic substances in the site's ground water, the deal soured. The company spent the next three years sparring with Forsyth County authorities over the property's depressed value. In March 1993, the state Property Tax Commission, citing the existence of ground-water problems, ruled that the property was worth $120,000, not the $635,000 assessed by the county.

The dramatic change in value is unrelated to the parcel's location. Rather, it's due to pollutants that have fouled the property over the past century, including a tar pit, the remains of a Duke Power coal-gasification plant and chemicals used in dry cleaning. Questions of who's responsible, how much it will cost to clean up and even how much the property is worth are in limbo and will likely remain unresolved for some time.

It's a familiar story throughout North Carolina. Regulations born of the environmental movement of the 1960s and '70s put a cloud over every commercial transaction. They also have created a new industry, putting lawyers to work blazing a paper trail to protect buyer, seller and lender from cleanup liability and sending consultants searching for evidence of contamination and figuring out how to clean it up.

"You're finding things nobody ever knew or cared were there," says Bill Aycock, a commercial real-estate lawyer with Schell Bray Aycock Abel & Livingston in Greensboro. He estimates environmental problems are evident in about 25% of the transactions he sees. That's conservative, other lawyers say. "You don't have a commercial real-estate transaction without some negotiations over environmental concerns," says Jim Conner, an environmental lawyer with Kennedy Covington Lobdell & Hickman in Charlotte.

The state has certified 1,050 geologists since it began certifying them in 1986. By analyzing soil structure and underlying geology, they assess whether waste has moved or will move enough to threaten ground water. The state licensing board for engineers does not break out individual specialties, but the growth in the number of environmental engineers has been explosive, says Jerry Carter, the board's executive secretary.

Environmental lawyers are now abundant in the state's large firms. In 1987, when the North Carolina Bar Association formed an environmental section, only 172 were practicing the specialty. There are now 476. "In the beginning you knew everybody in the country at least by name,"...