Dry Cleaning

The rain let up long enough today for me to visit a property in Midtown Atlanta I've been asked to assess, even though a light drizzle did fall on my head from time to time.  But it was an easy day today, more planning and working out logistics than anything else, and the main event is tomorrow.  It's no big thing - I do this kind of job all the time - but this post is the record of what I did today, and what I did today was basically to plan for tomorrow.  

For the record, the site doesn't look anything like the non sequitur picture above - I posted pictures of the Midtown site on a much sunnier autumn morning back in October.  

The issue is that the property adjacent to the site used to be a dry cleaner back in the 1950s and '60s, and the prospective purchasers of the site need to know if dry cleaning fluids from the past operations have contaminated soil or groundwater on the parcel they intend to buy.  So tomorrow I'll be taking soil, groundwater, and subsurface soil-gas samples both inside and outside of the building they're buying, and testing the samples for components of dry-cleaning solvents.  If the results come back clean, they can buy the property without worry.  If the samples come back contaminated, I can help the buyer come up with a clean-up and worker-protection plan if they still want to proceed with the transaction. 

If you're curious, dry-cleaning solvents have been detected in groundwater beneath dozens of Midtown properties, and while it's generally not an immediate danger to human health, it's not good for the environment and can result in a lot of money spent in clean-ups and investigations by the owners, even if they didn't cause the problem.  The lesson is if you're thinking about buying property in an urban or commercially developed area, you may want to research whether there were ever any dry cleaners or gas stations in the vicinity, or the transaction might wind up being a lot more expensive than you had imagined.

Call me, I can help.