Soil, Groundwater and Air Quality at Electroplating Facility

Impacts to soil and groundwater by chlorinated solvents were discovered during redevelopment of a property in downtown Seattle. TRC’s Client owns an active electroplating facility located upgradient from this redevelopment property. The redeveloper filed a lawsuit against TRC’s Client to recover costs for cleaning up the impacted media, assuming that the impacts were caused by TRC’s Client.

TRC was able to absolve our Client of approximately half of the claim costs due to various technical discrepancies used in the claim. We successfully limited our Client’s contributions to the settlement costs by thoroughly evaluating the dataset and using our detailed knowledge of regulations, customary re-development practices, and the litigation and mediation processes.

TRC managed to complete a comprehensive investigation of soil, groundwater, and indoor air quality within a congested active business with no impacts to daily work operations. TRC worked closely with the client to successfully utilize limited access drilling equipment and hand-collection methods to complete the data objectives without disruption or loss of revenue to their business. We pinpointed the release mechanism to a broken sewer line within the building and determine that the release was not from our Client, but a previous property owner.

To further assist with the eventual sale of our Client’s property, we provided a detailed breakdown of costs for several remedial alternatives that could be performed during redevelopment to bring the property into regulatory closure. These remedial alternative costs will ultimately be used during the purchase and sale negotiations.