Case Study- A Phase I ESA Gone Overboard
Last fall I was asked to assess part of a four-acre parcel of land in West Texas where a building had been razed the year before. The owner had split the parcel in two parts- west half and east half- and put on the market both for sale. A Phase I ESA on the W/2 was done by a South Texas environmental company (ECO) which also does testing (Phase II) and remediation (Phase III) environmental assessments.
A couple of months later, my client contacted me to do a Phase I ESA on the E/2 he is purchasing, and because the seller had the “Phase I ESA” done on the W/2, thought it would be something the purchaser of the E/2 could use, and thus my client sent me a copy to review. I found several important differences between the environmental assessment of the South Texas based ECO report and my assessment.
1. The ECO report barely mentions the fact that the building structure that was situated on both tracts was built exclusively and for the sole purpose of a residential dorm type building- a very environmentally innocuous use of the subject tract.
2. The ECO report had no 50-year chain of title- it did include a copy of the parent parcel title policy- not the same. That and having spent money on historical city directories does not equal a 50-year chain of title.
3. The ECO report did not give even a brief summary of the subsurface soil make-up for this area. Had they done so, they would have noted the thick layers of sub-surface strata of caliche and being hardened to the likeness of concrete. No vapor intrusion concerns.
4. The ECO report barely mentioned any hydrology research except to state that groundwater flows in this neighborhood would likely be to the northeast and is probably due to the surface elevations noted. But in this part of the county, the general findings as to water wells and ground water elevations, the groundwater is shown to flow NW to SE- as taken from the state’s 1989 water commission report for the county.
5. If bullet points # 3 & #4 are correct, then the ECO report would not need to be concerned regarding the closed dry-cleaning plant and gas station operations well over 500 feet to the south/southwest and not even adjacent.
Probably the biggest problem with this report- it purports to be based on the Phase I ASTM protocol, but a Phase I does not include soil sampling or testing- maybe some very specific shallow shovel sampling in an obvious suspect area- but certainly not a geo-tech style, deep bore soil sampling [which the ECO report also failed to state 1) where the soil borings were done and to what depth, and 2) the ECO report should have done an independent lab analysis of the soil samples and not this onsite “sniffer” test]. All this should have been done in a separate Phase II ESA report and assessment for taking samples etc.
The seller of the W/2 must have instructed the South Texas ECO to “please spend about $20-25,000 to “prove” through what would normally be a Phase II investigation with soil borings and a “sniffer test” so that there are no environmental concerns on that W/2”. No REC’s were found of course, but ECO sure did provide enough soil sampling to “prove a negative”. By using simple logic of the current/past use (resident facility) and knowing the general conditions of the soil, groundwater flows and adjacent uses (almost surrounded by residential homes or multifamily apartments) Matador Environmental Professionals gave quite a confident and reliable Phase I ESA report on the E/2 that there was minimal risk as to any environmental conditions without needing further Phase II investigation (and at a reasonable cost).
Lessons To Be Learned
It is important that the client knows and understands that Phase I is used to investigate a property to determine if there is the NEED for a Phase II assessment, by recognizing such site conditions needing deep soil sampling, drum removal, and other site cleanup actions.
And by that knowledge of the Phase I scope, the client/buyer/user should insist that the commission of any EP/Environmental company include such language that if there is a necessity for a Phase II assessment, it will be done by a different EP/ Environmental company.