Contaminated Sites Editing and Proofreading Services

A Phase 1 Environmental Site Assessment concludes with "no evidence of recognised environmental conditions identified." A prospective buyer reads this and believes the property has been tested and found clean. What actually happened is a records review, historical aerial photographs, and a walk-through inspection with no soil or groundwater sampling at all, because a Phase 1 assessment does not include testing by design, and the buyer's confidence rests on a distinction between two phases of assessment that the report's conclusion never actually explained.

We edit what environmental consulting firms produce to assess and disclose site contamination — Phase 1 and Phase 2 site assessment conclusions, sampling scope and data limitation disclosures, regulatory reporting and closure documentation, and the correspondence explaining an assessment's findings to a client making a real estate or lending decision. Our editors work on the gap between what an assessment actually did and what its conclusion is read to mean.

The specific scope of what was actually assessed is what a site assessment conclusion needs to carry with it, and its failure is a conclusion phrased in a way that a non-technical reader reasonably reads as more thorough than the underlying work. No evidence of recognised environmental conditions identified is an accurate description of a records-and-observation review; it is not a statement that the soil or groundwater were tested, and a buyer who reads it as the latter has been let down by a conclusion that never stated its own scope. We work through these so a Phase 1 conclusion states plainly that it involved no sampling, given that a reader unfamiliar with the distinction between assessment phases needs this stated rather than assumed as background knowledge; so any recognised environmental condition identified, and any recommendation for further investigation, is stated with the specific reason it was flagged, because a recommendation for a Phase 2 assessment buried in a technical section is easy for a non-technical reader to miss entirely; so historical land use findings that informed the conclusion are disclosed specifically, since a records review that found a prior gas station on the site and a records review that found nothing of concern support very different confidence levels behind the same conclusion sentence; so any limitation in records availability is disclosed, given that a conclusion based on incomplete historical records is different from one based on a complete history, and a reader needs to know which they are relying on; so a Phase 2 assessment's actual sampling locations, depths and results are stated specifically rather than summarised as passing or failing a standard, because a client making a decision needs the underlying data, not only a compliance conclusion; and so a client's specific question about what was and was not tested receives a direct, scope-specific answer. Assessments written this way mean a buyer's confidence matches what was actually done.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including site data, assessment findings and client correspondence. We are editors rather than environmental consultants, geologists or regulators, and we offer no view on contamination, assessment findings or regulatory compliance. What we can do is make sure the conclusion states what it is actually based on.