What a street name can tell you about your site

Is your site on Spring Lane or Clay Pit Road? When thinking about the environmental risks on your land, street or area names can provide valuable insight into its history and what might still lie below. Adler and Allan environmental risk survey manager, Bryan Cherry, explains how they can reveal potential environmental risks to an operation.

As facilities managers are responsible for ensuring compliance with regulations as well as maintaining assets it is important for them to be aware of any environmental risks on their site that could impact their operation.

Facilities managers managing sites that store or transport hazardous materials must manage these proactively, so that any potential risks or actual pollution can be reliably identified and understood fully. These should then either be prevented from arising in the first place or tackled promptly.

Water and ground contamination resulting either from a company’s activities or the condition of its infrastructure, equipment, pipelines and tanks, can bring many unwelcome consequences. They include clean-up and remediation costs, expensive downtime and disruption, reputational damage and heavy fines, private claims and even criminal prosecution of individuals.

Contamination Clues
Fantastic clues pointing towards existing contamination can be gathered by the road or street name your operation is on, as well as those in the immediate area. These flags may tell you much about potential problems under your feet and suggest an area’s environmental sensitivity and how it could be affected by your own activities.

This is because street names often derive directly from past industrial/rural/commercial activity, as well as natural features and ecologies – e.g., rivers, fields, topography, meadows and woodlands – existing flora and fauna (or plants and animals once there) and flooding events.

So, if your operation is on ‘Gasworks Lane’, there may well be lingering contamination from the waste generated by a now redundant industrial plant that once produced flammable gas. This unwelcome residue could include PAH, phenols, cyanides etc.

Similarly, ‘Tannery Row’ might still be blighted by the solvents and other toxins that were used to treat the skins and hides of animals in leather production, then carelessly spilled or disposed of before there was any real awareness of the dangers of doing so.

Meanwhile, ‘Dyeworks Road’ could host the dangerous by-products of the old dyeing process, such as arsenic, cancer-causing benzidine, allergy-inducing compounds or respiratory sensitisers, which can induce asthma and severe allergies.

All might have contaminated the soil and groundwater beneath the site and given the shifting emphasis of facilities managers from maintaining physical assets to ensuring the health and wellbeing of employees, being aware of these risks is vitally important.

Environmentally vulnerable
On the other hand, if your site sits on ‘Spring Bank’, there may be a lot of water just beneath the ground, because of a high water table. As such, the area is more likely to be environmentally vulnerable and easily impacted by your operations there than if it was on ‘Brickworks Lane’ – a factory type that would, typically, be underlain by clay, which limits the movement of contamination and is not a sensitive groundwater resource.

If you operate on ‘Flood Street’, it may indicate that the location has a history of flood events. With shifting rainfall patterns and woodland clearances on higher ground for ‘well managed landscapes’, these occurrences might become more frequent in upcoming years, affecting your operations.

Regular environmental risk surveys are key to ensuring understanding of the risks of environmental damage or potential damage bythe environment.

‘Tar Pit Lane’, for example, might indicate a site which has experienced a previous petroleum seep and could be marred by contaminated land in the vicinity, or could indicate a future possibility of a further subterranean bitumen leak to the surface, creating a large area of natural asphalt.

Source – pathway – receptor
The fundamental approach to these in the UK is to develop a conceptual model as the basis for risk assessment – and physical features or historical or current land use as indicated by street and area names can inform this greatly.

The model is a testable representation of environmental processes on a site and its vicinity, which predicts the source-pathway-receptor pollutant linkages that may apply to the operation.

The source of contamination is a substance that may be hazardous (cause harm to humans or to the environment).

The pathway is how the contamination reaches the receptor.

A receptor is, broadly, something that could be harmed by contamination.

Operational efficiency
Increasingly facilities managers are utilising mobile software to organise information and data to help them to manage their operation more efficiently.

By knowing where site risks exist, and structuring them by those that are most critical, facilities managers can plan remediation activity and asset replacement programmes accordingly.

Environmental risk management
Environmental risk surveys guide thinking on wider environmental risk management to help predict and describe how environmental incidents could arise (planning and prevention) and inform and target incident responses and measures to stop incidents happening in the first place.

A conceptual model describes the environmental setting of the site and source-pathway-receptor scenarios. It takes in geology and hydrogeology; water resources, including aquifers and surface water; ecologically sensitive features; known or anticipated contamination; current and historical uses of the land and surrounding area and future site uses.

Presented in diagrammatic, written or tabular formats, a conceptual model helps identify knowledge gaps and can be tested and refined at each stage of investigation to progressively reduce uncertainty, help inform regulators and provide focus for expenditure.

Peace of mind
There is never an absolute guarantee of preventing a contamination incident, but the more facilities managers can show that they have always been on top of all that happens on the site and acted responsibly and legally while its stewards, the easier it will be to persuade regulators, prosecutors and the courts that they weren’t reckless, negligent or deliberately harmful.

Environmental risk audits give facilities managers peace of mind in detecting and identifying the problems posed today and those that might occur in the future, reducing damage to the environment, reputation and finances.