Contaminated Sites Editing and Proofreading Services

"No evidence of recognized environmental conditions identified" is the line a Phase 1 Environmental Site Assessment ends on, and a prospective buyer reads it as proof that the property was tested and found clean. What happened was a records review, a set of historical aerial photographs, and a walk-through inspection, with no soil or groundwater sampling at all. A Phase 1 assessment does not include testing, by design. The buyer's confidence rests on a distinction between two phases of assessment that the closing sentence never explained.

The documents we edit for Contaminated Sites

Phase 1 and Phase 2 site assessment conclusions, sampling scope and data limitation disclosures, and regulatory reporting and closure documentation are the papers on which a property changes hands, and they are the papers we edit. The correspondence explaining an assessment's findings to a client making a lending or a real estate decision comes to us on the same footing. Our editors work on the gap between what an assessment actually did and what its conclusion is read to mean.

What the editing involves

The scope of the work performed is the thing a conclusion has to carry with it, and the failure is a conclusion phrased so that a non-technical reader reasonably takes it for more than the work behind it. "No evidence of recognized environmental conditions identified" accurately describes a records-and-observation review. It is not a statement that soil or groundwater were tested, and a buyer who reads it as one has been let down by a sentence that never stated its own scope. A Phase 1 conclusion saying in its own words that no sampling was performed removes the ambiguity in a single line.

Any recognized environmental condition identified, and any recommendation for further investigation, should be stated with the specific reason it was flagged. A recommendation for Phase 2 work buried on page 31 of a technical appendix is easy for a non-technical reader to miss, and it is often the most consequential sentence in the report. Historical land use findings deserve the same treatment, because a records review that found a gasoline station on the parcel between 1948 and 1971 and a records review that found nothing of concern support very different confidence in the same closing sentence.

Limitations in records availability belong in the conclusion rather than in a schedule at the back, given that a conclusion drawn from an incomplete history is not the same as one drawn from a complete history. A Phase 2 assessment carries the same obligation in a different form. Sampling locations, depths, and results should be stated specifically rather than summarized as passing or failing a standard, because a client deciding whether to buy needs the underlying data and not only a compliance verdict. When that client asks what was and was not tested, the answer should name the media, the depths, and the analytes, in the letter itself.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including site data, assessment findings, and client correspondence. We are editors, not environmental consultants, geologists, or regulators, and we offer no opinion on contamination, assessment findings, or regulatory compliance. What we can do is make sure the conclusion states what it is actually based on.