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Survey Report Land Contamination. What to do now?
tppshome
Posts: 1 Newbie
I'm a FTB and currently in the process of buying a house built in 1998. The searches have come back with possible land contamination from past industrial use i.e an old oil depot. The report states:
Contamination Source: Oil depot
Severity: High
Distance: 4 meters
The solicitors have said just to take out indemnity insurance but I'm more concerned about the potential health risks and ability to sell the house in future. What do I do from here? Do I instruct an environmental professional to look into this further? As I have no idea how to do this myself to a standard I would feel happy with. Should the soil and ground water be tested? Or should I just pull out of the sale?
Anyone have any experience with this?
Contamination Source: Oil depot
Severity: High
Distance: 4 meters
The solicitors have said just to take out indemnity insurance but I'm more concerned about the potential health risks and ability to sell the house in future. What do I do from here? Do I instruct an environmental professional to look into this further? As I have no idea how to do this myself to a standard I would feel happy with. Should the soil and ground water be tested? Or should I just pull out of the sale?
Anyone have any experience with this?
0
Comments
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Site investigation and clean up would have been required prior to development, so check the local council planning portal for any site survey reports.2
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This is the trouble with desktop reports. All they'll tell you is there used to be something contaminative there, they have no info on what cleanup has been done since.0
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How long ago was the oil contamination? Even heavy oil is done after 30 years because soil microbes eat it. I bought a house where the car park space had a red diesel tank in the 1980's - its a tarmac carpark now but still put some buyers off.Mr Generous - Landlord for more than 10 years. Generous? - Possibly but sarcastic more likely.0
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tppshome said:... The report states:
Contamination Source: Oil depot
Severity: High
Distance: 4 meters
The solicitors have said just to take out indemnity insurance ....Insurance against what? I don't see any uncertainty here, quite the opposite. Waste of money IMHO.Whether it's worth buying or not is a different question.
0 -
"Possible" land contamination. In other words they haven't a clue whether it's contaminated or not, and if it were, they don't know to what degree or what impact it would have, if any. Standard stuff. I once bought a house with a 'severe' risk of land contamination. It turned out that the grounds had been staff accommodation for a hospital 30 years prior, and that hospital, which was sited 50m away, "might have" disposed of some contaminated stuff in the distant past blah blah blah. It's a load of nonsense.0
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I would echo checking local council planning portal.
I purchased from a developer who bought up redundant petrol stations. All work re potential land contamination was accounted for.
Local ex gas works being developed at the moment0
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