Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Cost of Phase I ESAs
OMG!! I was online this morning doing some Google searching and found an ad for a nationwide firm that sells Phase I ESAs for $1500 anywhere in the US. I have to tell you that it is very dangerous to get such a product. I have been involved in the Phase I industry since 1984 when the Superfund Amendment Reauthorization Act passed congress and spawned the industry. I was a member of the original ASTM committee that wrote the 1993 guidance document. You cannot produce a good Phase I report for $1500. If we use a strip mall as an average property, it will take a good, experienced consultant about 20-24 hours to produce the report. There will be one hour of senior review, and then the production and outside services come to about $250 for each report. If you pay $1500 you are either getting a consultant to conduct the Phase I who is extremely desperate or not qualified. A good Phase I takes a perceptive, experienced individual who can find environmental problems at a site, if they exist. It is designed to give the purchaser protection under the CERCLA innocent landowner defense, and that is a weighty obligation to surrender to a substandard provider. Beware of what you order and your purpose for ordering. EDR came out with a recent survey that reported the average price of Phase Is in the US is now $2530, which is probably adequate. This price has come down over the last year due to economic conditions. Paying too much less than this may cause you problems that you had not considered. A Phase I is much more than something you use to check a box for a loan document.
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I agree 100 percent; you get what you pay for. I worked with a "discount" Phase I company that sent unqualified consultants to sites regularly. During a site investigation we conducted together, one consultant from this company didn't even recognize the metal cover he was standing on was an old monitoring well; had I not been there this fact would have missed the report. The client sponsored lawsuit will cost a lot more than $1,500.
ReplyDeleteWell said Dennis. Recently I was approached by a national firm to do Phase Is in California for a huge nationwide project. I do not know how much they were selling the Phase Is to their client for, but they offered me $750 to do the work. By my calculations that is about $35 per hour. I can't imagine any experienced professional accepting such an assignment. Like you, I have a lot of stories about unexperienced personnel missing very damaging evidence of environmental contamination, just because they did not know what they were seeing.
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