The Yass Valley Council are investigating divestment options for a former fuel depot owned by Council since 2012. Council’s records indicated the site had been historically used as a former fuel depot however no information regarding decommissioning of the site was available.
To inform Council’s risk profile of the site and to assist in future sales agreements, Council requested D&N conduct Phase 1 (desktop) and Phase 2 (detailed) investigations to assist in understanding the historical uses of the site and identifying the presence of potential contamination, ultimately to inform Council’s divestment planning process.
D&N were engaged to seek, obtain and review property information including publicly available records held with NSW Environment Protection Authority, SafeWork NSW and other jurisdictional bodies along with historical land title information and aerial imagery.
The review of this information identified a series of areas of concern that were ground-truthed during a site walkover, and with the use of a ground penetrating radar (GPR), identified remnant infrastructure and services and indications of subsurface disturbance.
D&N provided council with a conceptual understanding of the current and potential risks at the site, as well as providing recommendations for further actions required to better understand the potential liabilities with sale of the site.
Council subsequently engaged D&N to conduct an intrusive investigation which provided Council with an updated risk profile for the site.
The site is a former regional fuel depot, understood to have ceased trading in the late 80’s to early 90’s, an era when consideration of environmental risks was much less rigorous than today’s standards.
With the site currently leased as an operational set down and staging area for heavy vehicle haulage, D&N engaged with the site occupiers to minimise the impacts of our intrusive works.
In addition to utilising contemporary technologies (GPR) to provide an increased level of certainty to Council that the site has been, at the least, partially decommissioned, D&N provided advice to Council of potential acute risks to current and future site occupiers.
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