If the soil report states that remediation must take place, a BUS notification has been required since 2007. After that, there should have been remediation. But to know for sure if this has occurred, a remediation evaluation must have taken place. Where it often goes wrong in soil reports is that you read that remediation was going to take place, but it is not clear whether that remediation actually took place successfully. A very good example of this can be seen on pages 4 and 5 of this soil report of 141 Govert Flinck Street.
You can read the following in the above sample soil report of 141 Govert Flinckstraat:
You don’t read anywhere here that remediation actually took place, and more importantly, you don’t read anywhere whether there was a remediation evaluation.
So if you are buying this property, it is important to get more clarity on the status of the soil and any pending notices to begin remediation.
Therefore, what you should do here is to ask the creator of the soil report (in this example, it is the North Sea Canal Area Environmental Service) for more information.
With most environmental services or municipalities, you can easily request more information about a specific address (parcel). In this example of Govert Flinckstraat 141, you could make the following request on the website of the responsible environmental department:
The text we used here that you might want to copy is the following:
“At this property, the soil report states that the soil is contaminated and would (have to) be remediated. However, nowhere in the soil report do I see whether that remediation has ever taken place. If it has taken place, I would like to know if remediation was done properly and sufficiently. If remediation has not taken place, then I would like to know exactly what is known about the quality of the soil at this parcel and whether any actions (such as remediation) are needed for the owner of this parcel to undertake now or in the future.”
The reason that remediation never took place
If you read about identified contamination in a soil report, and/or prepare BUS notification and/or remediation plan, but the remediation never took place, what is going on?
The big question is: what could be the reason that, despite a “remediation plan,” no remediation ever took place? This could be when applying for an environmental permit for, say, a major renovation. To get the permit, they had a soil test done where contamination was found. One has prepared a BUS notification or a remediation plan and submitted it to the environmental agency (or municipality). And nothing ever happened after that. It may very well be then that, on second thoughts, they have abandoned the building plans after all and have stopped the process of applying for the building permit. However, the information about the contaminated soil is not lost in the process and you will read about it in the soil report.
Feedback from the Environment Department
In this example of Govert Flinckstraat 141 , the feedback from the environmental department to our question was the following:
“Based on the information known to them, no remediation has taken place at this property.”
That means there is probably just another active contamination at this property. What you could do if you want to buy this property is to have an exploratory soil test done. This costs approx. €1000 to €1500 and such a report will be available to you in about 4 weeks. Should you be looking for a company that can help you with this. Then please fill out this form and we will help you find a company in your area that can help with this.