May 27

We Work to Close: A Response to Channel 13’s Investigation on Voluntary Remediation Program

The water crisis in Flint, Michigan has sparked concerns over the cleanliness drinking water in Indianapolis and in every city and town across America. It seems like everyday we are learning about new sites where environmental contamination has been found presenting health risks to residences in rural and urban neighborhoods.  Here at EnviroForensics we applaud the media for highlighting this problem and want to clear up one major misconception regarding how fast or slow environmental investigations and remediations take place.  While many, many sites take an unnecessarily long time to get through the investigation and remediation process, we pride ourselves in pushing projects to site closure.  In fact, we have closed more solvent contaminated sites than any company in the Midwest,  because we know that it is in our clients’ best interest as well as the communities’ best interest.

Recently, Channel 13 in Indianapolis, reported on a series of potentially dangerous contamination Sites across the state that have gone unchecked for years. These chemicals can get into the drinking water or seep into homes in the form of vapor, creating a risk to residents.

While it is the Indiana Department of Environmental Management’s responsibility to ensure that the public is being protected from the contamination at these sites, some businesses find loopholes in the system that allow the cleanup process to drag on and on for years.

In the report by Channel 13, they found hundreds of businesses that have been protected from lawsuits by being in IDEM’s Voluntary Remediation Program while performing little to no cleanup for years and in some instances decades.

Our goal at EnviroForensics is to make sure a chemical contamination never becomes a serious risk to public health. We pride ourselves in working with our clients to cleanup environmental contamination in a timely manner so that the environment is cleaner and their property values can be restored.  At EnviroForensics we live by our moniker that we Turn Environmental Liabilities Into Assets and this can only be achieved by remediating contaminated sites.