Three steps to property cleanup.

• Author: Woodring, Jeannie
• Position: Includes related article

Is your property polluted? If so, here's what you can do to clean it up.

Times have changed, and nobody knows that better than property owners trying to comply with today's complex environmental laws.

For example, on hot summer afternoons decades ago, business owners sprinkled oil around their property to keep the dust down. Junkyard dealers smashed up batteries in their backyards to retrieve valuable lead. For the sake of convenience, manufacturers occasionally dumped or buried small quantities of waste materials on their industrial sites.

You don't dare try those practices today. A maze of federal, state and local environmental laws enacted from the 1970s to 1990s makes such acts a crime and imposes stiff penalties to clean up contaminated properties.

To comply with these laws, today's property owners have to ask questions like: How do I find out if my site is contaminated? If it is, how do I clean it up?

Finding answers to these questions will take you on a research journey from local, state and federal agencies to property owners and real estate companies. For an idea of what it takes to determine if your property is contaminated, read on.

CLARIFYING CONTAMINATION: PHASE I

When a property owner puts a site on the market for sale, the purchasing contract often contains a "due diligence" item, says Chris Stephens, an associate broker with Bond, Stephens and Johnson, an Anchorage real estate company. "This clause provides for a physical inspection of the property, which includes an environmental inspection," says Stephens. "Typically, the buyer will contract an environmental engineering consultant to do a phase I environmental assessment of the property, at the buyer's expense."

While consultants may be used for performing phase I site assessment, property owners can research many of the phase I details on their own. One of the first details to determine, says Matt Carr, a federal onsite coordinator for the Environmental Protection Agency in Anchorage, is "what type of business existed on the property."

James Bates, a project engineer at the Anchorage office of Woodward-Clyde Consultants, an international engineering and environmental services company, says, "Phase I site assessment consists of a review of existing information ... property, title and records research, etc. ... to see what kind of business existed at the property and to see what other kind of contaminated sites surrounded the property."

According to Lewis Ivers, manager of Alaska operations for EA Remediation Technologies, a division of EA Engineering of Anchorage, "Phase I starts with talking to current owners, finding out what the use of the site has been. Then look at historical records on who owned the property, and contact owners to find out how long they owned the property and used it. You basically become a detective and try to find out all you can about past uses of the property."

Most initial phase I site assessments prove that the property has a clean history, giving property buyers and sellers a clear conscience about potential environmental liabilities. Occasionally, however, research reveals that the property in question once housed a business that could have caused contamination, such as a dry cleaning firm, a junk yard, a battery factory or a gas station.

EPA's Carr recalls how in a recent case, a property turned out to be the former site of a battery-manufacturing facility. Carr advised asking the property owner, "How old is the facility? When did it first begin building batteries? What happened with the waste material left over from the manufacturing process?"

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