Environmental Site Assessments (ESAs)
for Odessa, Abilene, Lubbock, Dallas, TX & the Surrounding Areas

Environmental liability can completely derail property development projects and real estate transactions; as a potential buyer, it's vital for you to do your due diligence before purchasing. Property owners can be held liable for toxic hazards, even if they did not cause or know about them at the time of purchase. Including an environmental site assessment helps you understand the potential for pollutants, toxins, and other problems. An environmental site assessment can help detect the following issues:

• Undocumented landfilling
• Buried or leaking underground storage tanks
• Improperly managed industrial waste and other heavy metal impacts
• Soil and groundwater contamination
• Asbestos and/or mold
• Harmful solvents
• And More

During an ESA, we will collect information about your property and its history. We collect information through a number of different avenues to get as clear a picture as possible. After obtaining and summarizing the data, we will identify any possible environmental risks to the site based on the given information. Undergoing an environmental site assessment can save you time, money, and stress if your purchase is found to contain hazards.

Phase I ESAs are the first step in the site assessment process. Phase I ESAs are performed for buyers, sellers, brokers, and lenders involved in the sale, purchase, or lease of industrial, commercial, and agricultural properties. Phase I ESAs are typically required by lenders in order to assure that properties do not possess environmental conditions that could diminish the value of the property, the ability of the borrower to repay, and/or to establish baselines to allocate responsibility for clean-up costs. It satisfies the requirements of the Innocent Landowner Defense liability imposed by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA). If deemed applicable, initiating a Phase II ESA and a Phase III ESA can occur.

^eTECH’s Phase I ESAs are performed in accordance with the American Standard Test Method (ASTM) E 1527-13, (the “ASTM Standards”) and AAI, which have been deemed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to completely satisfy the requirements of CERCLA.

The scope of the Phase I ESA consists of interviews with past and present owners, operators, occupants, reviews of historical documents and records, including but not limited to:

• Aerial photographs, fire insurance maps, building department records, chain of title documents, and land use records
• Reviews of federal, tribal, state, and local government records
• A thorough visual on-site inspection
• Documentation of the presence or probable presence of contamination at the property

The purpose of the Phase I Environmental Site Assessment is to identify, to the extent feasible, Recognized Environmental Conditions (RECs) at the subject property. As defined in the ASTM Standards, RECs are “the presence or likely presence of any hazardous substances or petroleum products on a property under conditions that indicate an existing release, a past release, or a material threat of a release of any hazardous substances or petroleum products into structures on the property or into the ground, groundwater, or surface water of the property.”

This data is utilized as a means for companies and property owners to assign monetary values in order to remediate any problem that is identified by the REC data. The data collected must be thorough and detailed to provide a clear picture of existing conditions in the field. ^eTECH has designed and implemented its own proprietary database system which streamlines this process, allowing the entire assessment process to be more efficient and cost effective.