Dirty Property

Another Site Achieves Closure

David McAlister — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:25:22 +0000

I am proud to announce that we have achieved closure for one of our clients at a property in Gardena, California. Here is a little bit of information about the project:

From the late 1980s to 1997, a manufacturer of metal fasteners for the aerospace industry and military was located at the site. These former operations are reported to have included the use of Aboveground Storage Tanks (ASTs) and petroleum solvents. The former property owner also operated a waste storage area near the center of the southern portion of the site. The site is currently occupied by various tenants that utilize the property for warehousing, distribution, and small-scale manufacturing.

Several phases of soil, soil gas, and groundwater investigations have been performed at the site between 1998 and 2006. The primary objective of subsurface investigations at the site was to provide analytical data that will identify the nature and extent of PCE in soil and groundwater beneath the site. To help meet this objective, a total of twelve soil borings have been advanced at the site to help characterize PCE in soil. Three soil gas probes were advanced at the site to help characterize PCE in soil gas. Additionally, GeoTrans installed and sampled groundwater monitoring wells at the site in two locations to characterize PCE in groundwater.

Based on the results of this current program and previous soils investigations at the Site, GeoTrans concluded that very low concentrations of PCE are present beneath the southern portion of the Site. We worked with the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board and concluded that the presence of this constituent at the concentrations detected during our site investigations is unlikely to pose a significant threat to human health or the environment. Therefore, no further work is warranted at this time in regards to soil and groundwater at the site.

Soil Investigation

David McAlister — Wed, 21 May 2008 23:22:24 +0000

It has been a few weeks since my last post, but it is time I followup on one of my previous posts regarding impacted soil. In that post, I described a situation where an Underground Storage Tank (UST) was encountered and needed to be removed. During the process of removing the tank, we found that the tank had leaked and impacted the soil and potentially the groundwater in the area of the tank excavation. The excavation had to be back-filled to allow other construction activities at the property to continue, so we removed as much stained soil as we could and back-filled the excavation with a one sack slurry. We also transported the impacted soil offsite and had it properly disposed of.

Now, it’s time to get on with the investigation of the tank leak. Let’s assume that the depth to groundwater in this area is relatively shallow (<30′). Let’s also assume that the soils in the area are sandy or fine-grained (not cobbles or boulders). With these assumptions, we will be able to perform our investigation using a direct-push rig. This device is a truck mounted device that uses the weight of the truck and a hydraulic hammer to drive rods into the sub-surface allowing the operator to collect soil, soil gas, and groundwater samples.

We will collect a few soil samples, soil gas samples, and groundwater samples around the tank area, but there is a significant amount of setup work that needs to be done first. I’ll get into that in my next blog post.

Major Fines in Philadephia for UST Infractions

David McAlister — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:12:06 +0000

I saw this posted on ENS-Newswire.com and thought I would re-post here since it deals with subject matter from one of my previous posts.

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania, March 19, 2008 (ENS) - The U.S. EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board has ordered a company that owns gas stations in the mid-Atlantic states to pay a $3.16 million penalty for violations involving 72 underground fuel storage tanks at 23 gas stations.

In a ruling announced today, the board upheld the agency’s enforcement action against the owner of Lowest Price gas stations in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

In cooperation with state and DC officials, the EPA filed a complaint in September 2002 against gas station owner Euclid of Virginia, Inc. for violating regulations designed to detect and prevent fuel leaks from underground storage tanks.

A leaking underground storage tank is excavated - not at a Euclid-owned station. (Photo courtesy EPA)

In a March 11, 2007 decision, the board ruled against every issue raised in an appeal filed by Euclid of Virginia, Inc.

The company had appealed an administrative law judge’s November 2006 assessment of a $3.08 million penalty for these violations - the largest penalty ever assessed by an EPA administrative law judge for violations of any federal environmental law.

Instead, the board ruled in favor of EPA’s cross-appeal against Euclid, increasing this precedent-setting penalty to $3,164,555.

“With millions of gallons of gasoline, oil, and other petroleum products stored in underground tanks, leaving them unchecked can cause major soil and groundwater contamination,” said Donald Welsh, regional administrator of EPA’s mid-Atlantic region.

Leaking tanks are a major source of soil and groundwater contamination. EPA and EPA-authorized state regulations are designed to reduce the risk of underground leaks, and avoid the costs of major cleanups.

“This decision should send a strong message to owners of underground storage tanks that it is not only in the public’s best interest but in their own, too, to comply with leak detection and prevention requirements,” said Welsh.

The violations involved 14 gas stations in Maryland, two in Virginia, and seven in the District of Columbia.

The board found that the EPA had proved that Euclid failed to maintain required leak detection and control equipment, failed to perform required leak detection activities and failed to comply with corrosion-prevention standards.

The company also was found to have failed to properly install or maintain equipment to prevent releases of gasoline due to the overfilling of tanks or other spills when tanks are being filled, and failed to maintain required financial assurances.

The size of the penalty is due not only to the large number of facilities and underground storage tanks involved, but also to Euclid’s repeated non-compliance with the same regulations over periods that often lasted for several years.

The administrative law judge cited the breadth of the violations, Euclid’s “high degree of negligence” and its overall record of non-compliance in allowing violations to continue despite numerous warnings from the EPA and the Maryland, Virginia and District of Columbia state environmental agencies as further justification for the substantial penalty.

The state and DC agencies coordinated with the EPA to conduct numerous inspections of Euclid-owned gas stations, and inspectors from each agency served as witnesses at the trial.

Euclid has the right to appeal the board’s decision again, this time in federal circuit court.

Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2008. All rights reserved.

New Vapor Intrusion Standard Released

David McAlister — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:39:52 +0000

Earlier this month, the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) published a new standard for the assessment of vapor intrusion into structures on property involved in real estate transactions (ASTM 2600-08). You can read the ASTM press release here.

Generally speaking, vapor intrusion is an indoor air quality condition that occurs when chemicals volatilize from impacted soil and groundwater beneath a building to fill that building with potentially hazardous vapors.

Vapor intrusion has become a significant environmental concern in recent years as properties that were formerly manufacturing facilities, gasoline stations, dry cleaners, or for other reasons have impacted soil and/or groundwater are redeveloped into offices, residential buildings, or mixed use facilities. Until ASTM took the responsibility upon their shoulders, there has been a lot of discussion and inconsistencies about the appropriate methods of measuring the vapor intrusion impact within structures and the appropriate methods of estimating the risk associated with that impact. This new standard is a significant milestone for this emerging area of property due diligence, but I feel that this will be a long and tortuous path with many more milestones to come.

This assessment standard goes a long way to identify the process of assessing the potential Vapor Intrusion Condition (pVIC) or the Vapor Intrusion Condition (VIC) and how the assessment of the VIC relates to the previously established due diligence procedures of a Phase I (ASTM 1527-05). The vapor intrusion standard also provides a prescriptive method on how to identify if a pVIC exists and when a Phase I would identify the need for a vapor intrusion screen to be performed. What the standard does not do is provide a prescriptive method for determining if vapor intrusion results in an indoor air quality level that presents a threat to human health and the environment; at this point the standard directs the user to follow appropriate and applicable government guidance documents. As I have stated in my previous posts, here in Southern California, the convoluted regulatory community could potentially make this part of the site assessment grind to halt or worse underestimate the thret to human health and the environment.

This problem is only exaserbated by the fact that ASTM is only an engineering standards organization, not a regulatory body. Even though this standard is published by ASTM and will be used quite frequently almost immediately by due diligence professionals like myself; it may be decades before state and/or local regulatory agencies begin to recognize site assessments performed and published in full compliance with the standard.

There will be more to come in the saga of vapor intrusion, stay tuned!

Pause Post - Definition of Terms

David McAlister — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:51:42 +0000

To continue on the subject of the last post, let’s assume that you disposed of the tank and the pea gravel or sand that surrounded the tank without incident. You even excavated as much of the stained soil from the base of the excavation as possible while you had the excavation contractor onsite. Let’s also assume that you were able to back-fill the excavation with 1 sac slurry without incident. The soil samples you collected from the base of the excavation came back with gasoline and BTEX, so you will have to perform an additional investigation under the direction of the County Fire Department. You’ve hired your drilling contractor to come out and collect some soil samples as well as install some vapor extraction wells.

You may be thinking to yourself, “I am starting to not understand these terms”. That’s completely fine. Let me take a minute to define a few of these terms before we move on:

BTEX - A combination of volatile organic compounds commonly found in gasoline, Benzene, Tolulene, Ethylbenzene, and Xylenes. Xylenes inlcude m,p-xylenes, o-xylenes, and total xylenes. These compounds all have their own regulatory limits, there is no regulatory limit for BTEX as a group.

Clean Certificate - A Marine Chemist will certify the tank for “Hot Work”. If “Hot Work” will be done on the tank at the destination it will be transported to, the certification that the tank is clean and vapor free should be performed by a certified Marine Chemist.

CUPA - Certified Unified Program Agency, a California state agency. The CUPA was created by SB 1082 in 1994 to consolidate a number of hazardous material programs into one single agency. In many areas the local CUPA is the local fire department, but based on where your property is located your CUPA may be a city agency, the department of health services, or the local arm of the Environmental Protection Agency. In the previous post, the CUPA agency is the Los Angeles countyHot Work - Welding or cutting of metal with a torch.

Marine Chemist - A person qualified to certify a tank as “clean” meaning that all visible deposits, sludge, and all other foreign materials have been removed from the inside of the tank and that there is no flammable hazard or vapors exist. The Marine Chemist fills out the “Clean Certificate”.

One Sack Slurry - A type of cement mix that is delivered in a cement truck. It is mixed at the cement plant and consists of one sack of portland cement to one sack of aggregate, in this case we usually use medium sand. The benefits of a one sack slurry is that is has a pretty good compressive strength meaning that you can drive a truck over it and once it is dry and it can still be worked with an excavator or a backhoe.

Pea Gravel - Gravel, usually crushed granite, that falls within a certain size range that roughly equals the size of a pea. This type of gravel, sand, or one-inch crushed rock is used when a UST is installed because it doesn’t settle or allow the tank to shift around inside the tank pit.

UST - Underground Storage Tank, usually used to hold petroleum hydrocarbons such as gasoline or diesel. Can also be used to hold industrial chemicals and waste oil.

That is a good ammout of information for this post, so I’ll end it there. Next time we’ll discuss what is involved with investigating the extent of the imacts from this leaking tank.

Regulatory FAQ - II

David McAlister — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 01:26:32 +0000

Back to our regularly scheduled program of regulatory how-to. One of the problems that I mentioned in my last post that you may encounter is the potential that the Underground Storage Tank (UST) that you were planning to remove leaked during it’s former use. Let’s assume again that the tank held automotive gasoline. Let’s also assume that the tank is located in Los Angeles County and therefore all work will be overseen by the Site Mitigation Unit of the Health and Hazardous Materials Division of the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

You went ahead and filed the permits to remove your tank, paid the fees and got approval. You also scheduled with your contractor to excavate the tank and remove the tank in the presence of the inspector. The inspector also required you to have a marine chemist on site during the tank pull, so she shows up and runs her tests, fills out her forms and now you are good to go. Until the tank is pulled and exposes a small rust hole and a relatively large patch of stained soil beneath the tank.

Now you have a site investigation on your hands. You will still collect samples from the sidewalls and the base of the excavation, but the samples you collect from the base of the excavation will be impacted with gasoline.

The County Fire Department will require an investigation whether you backfill or not, so let’s just say that in this case you need to backfill because you have other redevelopment contractors that need to be able to drive over the area. Go ahead and order your 1 sack slurry from your local cement supplier and fill that excavation up. You will also have to dispose of the pea gravel or sand that was around the tank so call your favorite trucking company and find a place that will accept the material.

Call a drilling company and plan on collecting soil samples and installing a soil vapor extraction system. We’re into remediation now, hold tight for the next installment in the process.

Lead Detected in Candy

David McAlister — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 16:09:00 +0000

I know that this post is a diversion from the Regulatory FAQ series that I promised in my last post, but I feel this is important so here it is:

I received an email yesterday from the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) , the agency responsible for determining the levels at which chemicals, compounds, and elements are toxic to human health and/or the environment. This email stated that candies containing chili powder and tamarind have been found to contain lead in the candy wrapper and in the candy itself. The lead is believed to be naturally-occurring and is also believed to be somewhat avoidable through good agricultural and manufacturing practices. The email went on to state the following:

Chili powder and tamarind are popular ingredients in Mexican-style candies that are sold in California. Data have shown that some of these Mexican-style candies are contaminated with the toxic metal lead. Research has determined that some of the lead in the candies comes from the chili powder and tamarind ingredients. A new law in California requires that OEHHA develop standards for the naturally-occurring level of lead in candies and for the acceptable levels of lead in candy wrappers. This law is intended to help identify candies that should not be sold in California (California Health and Safety Code, section 110552). OEHHA is in the process of determining how much lead in chili powder and tamarind, as well as other candy ingredients, might be due to naturally-occurring lead. OEHHA is also determining other ways lead may contaminate chili powder and candies, include processing and packaging.
OEHHA requests submission of data relevant to its determination of the level of naturally-occurring lead in candies containing chili and tamarind, as defined in California Health and Safety Code, section 110552(c)(3).

Workshops will be held at the following times and locations:

San Diego Area:

DATE: March 5, 2008
TIME: 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
PLACE: Sherman Heights Community Center
2258 Island Ave.
San Diego, California

Los Angeles Area:

DATE: March 6, 2008
TIME: 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
PLACE: Junipero Serra State Office Building, Pacific Ocean Room
320 West 4th St.
Los Angeles, California

Additionally, interested parties are encouraged to contact:

Dr. John Faust
Reproductive and Cancer Hazard Assessment Branch
Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment
1515 Clay Street, Suite 1600
Oakland, CA 94612
(510) 622-3185 (phone)
(510) 622-3211 (fax)
jfaust@oehha.ca.gov (e-mail)

I will post here as more information becomes available.

Regulatory FAQ

David McAlister — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:54:25 +0000

One question I commonly get is, “What is the regulatory agency for my property?”. This relatively simple question has an amazingly complex answer. The answer is so complex that I will spend the next few blog posts answering it.

Let’s first discuss a relatively common and relatively simple situation, a site with an Underground Storage Tank or UST. In this scenario lets say you will need to remove the tank as part of your property redevelopment activities. Maybe the property was an old gas station, maybe it was an old warehouse that had a diesel UST for delivery trucks, or perhaps the UST was used to store waste oil from some sort of operation that was formerly conducted at the property. In any case, the tank must be removed and you need a permit to do that, but who will be issuing the permit?

Again, this relatively simple question has a quite difficult answer when we go to hunt down the regulatory agency for the property. In the State of California, issues of this nature are overseen by the local Certified Unified Program Agency or “CUPA ” . The CUPA was created by SB 1082 in 1994 to consolidate a number of hazardous material programs into one single agency. In many areas the local CUPA is the local fire department, but based on where your property is located your CUPA may be a city agency, the department of health services, or the local arm of the Environmental Protection Agency. Other programs overseen by your local CUPA include:

Hazardous Materials Business & Emergency Response Plans;
Underground Storage Tank Regulations;
Hazardous Materials Business Plans;
Hazardous Waste Regulations;
Hazardous Waste Treatment Regulations; and
Risk Management Plans.

For converstaion’s sake, let’s narrow it down a little and say that the property is located in Los Angeles County, specifically the City of Santa Monica and let’s just say the property is a former gas station and the tank formerly held automotive gasoline. These assumptions will narrow the CUPA agency down to the City of Santa Monica Environmental Programs Division. A quick review of the City of Santa Monica website (link) tells us what form has to be filled out and what fees are required to file the application. There is an extensive packet of CUPA information that (hopefully) was partially filled out when the tank was installed, but you may have to catch up on the filing if it wasn’t done or if it was done incorrectly. This could also mean paying back-fees. You will have to file the forms, schedule a contractor to pull the tank, schedule an inspection at the time of the tank pull, collect soil samples, arrange for a laboratory to analyze the soil sample, write a report, submit the report to the CUPA agency (City of Santa Monica in this instance), and backfill the excavation.

Hopefully the tank didn’t leak. If it did, there is usually an investigation and removal action required that involves more agency interaction and will most likely be more than just the CUPA, but that also depends on the property location and every City/County is different.

There is also always the chance that your property is part of a larger investigation area or Federal Superfund investigation. The complexity increases quite a bit at that point, more info in my next post…

New Groundwater Incentive Program

David McAlister — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 16:54:30 +0000

The Sate Water Resources Control Board has launched a new program to provide low-interest loans for projects that benefit the State of California and local entities.

The specific types of projects that the program will support include:

Construction of wastewater treatment and water recycling facilites;
Implementation of nonpoint source projects and programs;
Development and implementation of estuary comprehensive conservation and management plans; and
Storm water treatment projects.

The SWRCB will be holding workshops at four different locations throughout California during the month of Januay.

More information can be found on the attached flyer: SWRCB Flyer

Welcome!

David McAlister — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 17:01:52 +0000

Welcome to my blog!

My name is David McAlister, thanks for stopping by and checking out my blog. Here I will post my thoughts and impressions on the commercial and industrial real eastate market, specifically propety where the soil and/or groundwater has been adversely impacted in some way and requires environmental scrutiny. To put it briefly, dirty property.

I have been working in the environmental consulting field in the Los Angeles area for a little over 6 years now, first at Environmental Resources Management (ERM) and now at GeoTrans, a division of TetraTech.

My professional experience has been predominantly in the support of industrial and commercial real estae transactions, specifically Phase I & Phase II investigations, agency interaction, and in-depth site investigation / remediation work. I have been working with real estate agents, loan agents, loan processors, investors, and developers. My professional experience has also included litigation support and regulatory compliance as well site investigation and remediation for a number of Fortune 100 companies over the years at various sites in the greater Los Angeles area. This has provided me with exposure to vast array of environemtnal challenges that are facing property managers and risk management professionals today.

I hope you find my blog informative and somewhat entertaining. I will attempt to keep things light because I know that some of the technical details I work with can be extremely dry. Feel free to post your comments and / or questions any time, I would love the feedback!