Without going into the intimate details, I am in the early stages of a commercial build and we are examing the site for suitability. Looking at the documentation, I suspected that there used to be a gas station on the site many years ago. In fact, I have a survey for a city water line from about 1954 that has a note “filing station” and an arrow to some shapes on the corner.
Then we had soil testing done for foundation design, and two of the samples were noted to have fuel odors. Next step was the neat part, we called in a company that specializes in finding stuff, and they used a ground penetrating radar on a sled pulled across the site in a grid pattern, and sure enough they found some “anomolies” so we broughtin a backhoe and got to digging. The backhoe operator had to be certified in UST remediation in case there was something there. Pretty strict chain of custody for all the soil samples too. And yes we did find two old tanks and some piping in the ground.
I got a screen shot of the radar picture, and I can tell where the tanks were, but only because they point it out with an arrow. The radar operators must be trained pretty well to be able to interpret the images.
“Put your creed in your deed.” Emerson
“When asked if you can do something, tell’em “Why certainly I can”, then get busy and find a way to do it.” T. Roosevelt
Replies
That's quite a story, but mine's better.
I have a Magic Shovel........
It finds rocks anywhere I want a hole.
Joe H
I was wundering what G8 did with those two tanks he dug up on his site a couple of weekss ago....
Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming
WOW!!! What a Ride!
Forget the primal scream, just ROAR!!!
If you have fuel contaminated soil, do you have to remove it?
Yes. But's it's not my problem, the land owner has to clean it up. We are leasing the site. Apparently they didn't catch it when they bought the land, and thus didn't tell us when we leased it. I found the problem after all the paperwork was signed."Put your creed in your deed." Emerson
"When asked if you can do something, tell'em "Why certainly I can", then get busy and find a way to do it." T. Roosevelt
You dodged a bullet on that one.
The owner may get some relief by applying for some of the super fund money if the original business owner can not be located or the abandonment predates the EPA formation.
Good luck in moving forward with the project. We have suffered through a few of those clean ups and the bureaucratic maze they involve was a nightmare.lved