The chances of sweeping pollution messes under corporate or government rugs are dropping towards zero across Alberta. The province is now introducing a central public record, akin to the land titles registry, of contaminated sites.

Enter ESAR, the Environmental Site Assessment Repository. Posted on the internet by Alberta Environment, the new digital data bank will include all real estate marred by spills from tanks, wells, pipelines and other business or industry facilities from urban service stations to crude oil pumps in farm fields.

The disclosure program’s schedule calls for posting downstream industry problem sites, such as leaky gas bar storage tanks, this spring. More complex records on upstream oil and gas exploration and production locations are due to start coming available on the new system this fall.

The repository’s mandate requires candid disclosure of conditions on problem properties, from potential contamination issues to official pollution assessments, cleanup efforts and site remediation certificates. Information will be provided in standard forms that can be readily understood. Training in the ESAR computer software is being made available to personnel expected to be frequent users of contaminated sites data.

“This didn’t really enter people’s consciousness until recently. Now it’s become a fairly big issue,” says Gordon Dinwoodie from Alberta Environment’s climate change, air and land policy branch.

Polluted sites could even be described as the most frequent public concern in Alberta by one standard – desire to know about them. Dinwoodie’s department receives 70 to 80 per cent of the nearly 2,000 formal Freedom of Information applications that the public makes to the provincial government each year. Alberta Environment also deals with an annual flow of about 2,000 routine requests for disclosures of material that is already publicly available but can be hard for outsiders to unearth from vast government data sources. About four-fifths of all the information demands on Alberta Environment are about contaminated sites, Dinwoodie reports.

The ESAR computer program is no bonus for the province’s green critics. The system is designed to keep the data off limits from fishing expeditions. Requests for information have to specify locations. Also, the software does not accommodate research surveys intended to generate Alberta pollution portraits, catalogues or overall contamination maps.

The system caters to a commercial form of public demand that dominates frequent use of detailed environmental data. Business – and especially property buyers and mortgage lenders – sought the contaminated sites repository. By comparison, environmentalists and scientific, political and journalistic researchers only occasionally use this type of information.

Alberta’s auditor-general office called for creation of a central, accessible polluted land data bank about six years ago. The facts had been scattered among regional Alberta Environment bureaus and a variety of filing systems where even government staff found it difficult to track down contaminated sites information, the watchdog agency said in its annual report on the province’s 2002-03 budget year.

“We estimate that more than 5,000 files exist around the province.” In regional or district offices of Alberta Environment, “staff update hard copy files with correspondence, site reports and interview notes. Summary information about each file is maintained on a variety of systems around the province. There is no integrated system that collects information about all contaminated sites in the province,” the auditor-general office observed.

Dinwoodie dates the birth of public demand for pollution site archives at around 1990. The need evolved because conflicts and court cases over responsibility for paying cleanup costs set precedents saying that contaminated sites create significant, enforceable legal and financial liabilities. “The banks are really risk-averse on this kind of stuff,” Dinwoodie reports. “They want no whiff of cleanup bills.”

In theory, Canadian environmental law makes polluters pay for cleaning up any contamination they cause. In practice, old trouble sites can be orphans with long histories of changing hands many times after problem-causing operations go out of business. Rising cleanup standards and complex liability rules catch up with combinations of current owners, potential buyers, lenders and government agencies in such cases.

Since the early- to mid-1990s, it has become virtually impossible for would-be buyers of property to obtain credit for real estate transactions if there is any suspicion of environmental contamination. Requirements are in force throughout the financial community for clean bills of health, such as provincial remediation certificates, on land that has a history of trouble.

Concern is growing too. Property buyers and mortgage lenders increasingly look into the condition of land that never had polluting installations but that is near trouble spots. Residential and commercial real estate developers alike want to know if leaks from storage tanks or grease pits at an old country garage, for instance, spread beyond its site onto property slated for suburban homes or shopping malls.

The new contaminated sites repository is designed to help risk managers answer questions about environmental conditions in areas around projects. Old printed records are being put into digital form for ESAR postings.

Alberta is far from the only jurisdiction in need of systematic polluted site records. Nor does industry alone have a backlog of old trouble spots in need of cleanups. The extent of the problem is documented in a recent paper on detecting dozens of nasty substances written by Environment Canada specialists after an Ottawa-based team research effort funded by more than two dozen municipal, provincial and federal government agencies.

“Petroleum hydrocarbons (PHCs) have been widely recognized as one of the most widespread soil contaminants in Canada, the United States and worldwide. About 60 per cent of Canada’s thousands of contaminated soil sites involve PHC contamination which impairs the quality and use of both land and water,” the experts write.

“Annually, costs for cleanup of PHC-contaminated soils and sediments are very high. In 2002-03, the estimated liability of the Canadian federal government alone for petroleum-contaminated sites was $3.4 billion.”

Alberta’s auditor-general has described a complete, accessible inventory of polluted spots as a step towards cleanups. “Making information accessible to those who need it will enhance the management of individual sites,” the watchdog agency predicts.