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Hello there every one l am new here and need a bit of advice.After along wait we finally got a place with enough space to keep some hens and grow some of our owm produce. But while we were on a family holiday last year we had a fire that involved part of the garage and the oil tank.The oil has been delt with by the insurance company (we hope) but I am concerned that the foam used by the fire fighters may have run off into my plot. Any ideas.

Danny Boy wrote:Hello there every one l am new here and need a bit of advice.After along wait we finally got a place with enough space to keep some hens and grow some of our owm produce. But while we were on a family holiday last year we had a fire that involved part of the garage and the oil tank.The oil has been delt with by the insurance company (we hope) but I am concerned that the foam used by the fire fighters may have run off into my plot. Any ideas.

The foam itself is unlikely to be a problem, but firefighting run-off will have picked up combustion products and any general contamination from the area where the fire was. I'd find a lab that can advise you what you should test for (they'll need to know as much history about the site as possible), advice on how you should collect samples and give you a quote for the analysis and interpretation.

If the insurance claim is still open I'd ask the insurers to foot the bill - but I'd also be asking for very specific analysis to demonstrate as fact that they;ve dealt with the oil contamination. I wouldn't be happy just hoping that things are ok, I'd expect the insurer to be able to prove it to my satisfaction.

thanks for the advice , the insurance company has now issued a cert from a lab to say that the oil has been delt with properly. Now we have to decide what to do as regards the run off from the fire

Ask the insurers to pay for soil analysis for the area the fire-fighting runoff drained to.

Hopefully the certificate from the insurers includes the line, "hydrocarbons - n/d", but the one for the fire-fighting run-off will have to analyses for a few other substances as well.