Comments
In my experience, even the presence of a spur usually results in soil around the tracks being elevated in PAHs, arsenic and sometimes hex chromium (from treating the ties) to concentrations above residential exposure standards. So in my opinion current or historic rail spur presence is a REC - though it should not affect industrial or routine commercial use moving forward.
This could also be the floor penetration for an electric conduit - the outer plastic pipe is consistent with such a penetration. They're not usually corroded like this one, but it's not unknown. I like Tom's suggestion to open the cap and snake the pipe.
Keep in mind that NFAs are typically issued relative to past releases or UST closures - such as in the case of replacement of old tanks with new ones. The "complete environmental review" should specify an audit of the facility's post-NFA operations, including tank tightness testing records (pressure testing, product inventory, and/or groundwater monitoring) and a full review of the design and installation records of the current tank systems.
If you plan to own and operate a gas station, you should probably assume that you will at some future time have environmental liabilities. It kind of goes with the territory.
From 40 CFR 312:
Environmental Professional means:
(1) a person who possesses sufficient specific education, training, and experience necessary to exercise professional judgment to develop opinions and conclusions regarding conditions indicative of releases or threatened releases (see §312.1(c)) on, at, in, or to a property, sufficient to meet the objectives and performance factors in §312.20(e) and (f).
(Bolding is mine.) Until you have assisted with enough Phase I ESAs to establish the necessary experience to make informed judgments, I do not believe you qualify as an EP as defined by USEPA.
I've done this several times for publicly-funded housing rehab projects. You need to make sure your database search covers the appropriate distance beyond all properties, obviously. And you might get a LOT of listings to work through and evaluate. But there's nothing in the ASTM Standard that prevents doing it.
In my part of the country, residential developments usually were predated by farming, which is a developed use. But it's seldom possible to ascertain exactly when farming was first done on properties when farming was first performed in the early 1800s. Technically this is a data gap, but it isn't usually significant in identifying RECs. Agriculture in the 1850s would not be expected to result in RECs.
I've found other providers whose aerial photograph resources are superior to what I have received from EDR. Not sure why, but EDR could stand to step up its game in this area.
I'm also looking forward to the day when Sanborn maps are scanned to higher resolution. There are times when the map pdfs obscure details that could be useful. If the pdfs become too large to email, then use a download service (wetransfer.com works well for me) or an ftp server - file size is not an excuse any more.
Cleanup of residential (distillate) fuel oil spills can indeed be an expensive mess when releases have occurred. Fortunately, the warning properties are excellent (believe me, you'll know by the stink if fuel oil release has occurred from a basement AST), and distillate fuel oil is extremely biodegradable. I won't say residential USTs are never an issue, but I believe in most areas they will be relatively uncommon and unlikely to present significant concerns.
Coal (and by extension asphalt) presents an interesting dilemma. Any ash dumping (even minor amounts) will probably leave concentrations of arsenic, lead and PAHs (notably benzo(a)pyrene) that will exceed residential standards. But so will remnant asphalt paving, at least for PAHs. Are we to call asphalt remnants RECs? The definition in the ASTM Standard is met ...
Actually, the E1527 Standard calls for historical research to extend back to initial development, including agricultural development. Not sure why this 1940 thing seems significant to most people, since most places I've worked were developed earlier than that.
tkm52, many of us have been schooled by attorneys to avoid placing recommendations in our Phase I reports. Your comment points out one reason why: if your client chooses not to follow such a recommendation, he subjects himself to potential liability down the road.
As to "ignoring possible problems" -- remember that the goal of an ASTM-standard Phase I ESA is not to "identify problems," it's to identify Recognized Environmental Conditions. Certainly if you believe, based on your experience with a particular building material, that potential liabilities exist, you should tell your client, but I'd recommend doing so orally. In that way you have not created a possibly-damaging paper trail that could create lots of headaches for them later.
We're not tasked as EPs to guess as to fuel sources, nor to guess as to anything else.
If you cannot find someone who is knowledgeable about heating and cooling at this property, and if diligent inquiry (interviews and file reviews at local agencies responsible for fuel storage tank regulation) does not confirm past UST presence, then I see no reason to presume that USTs were present.
Again, a Phase I with no finding of RECs is not a guarantee that no contamination is present. It simply means we could not find "likely presence" of contamination.