Site History: The Foundation of Environmental Liability

Environmental professionals understand that contaminated site management begins with a fundamental question: who is responsible for the contamination?

Under Section 112 of Alberta’s Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act, liability belongs to whoever was responsible for the site at the time of the release—not the current owner, and not the party who discovered it. This distinction matters enormously. When contamination occurred in 1987 but was discovered in 2024, and your client acquired the property in 2015, a well-documented site history becomes your strongest evidence that liability belongs elsewhere.

Yet most environmental projects treat responsibility as a given. Teams move directly to risk assessment and remediation planning without first establishing whether their client should be responsible at all. We believe this represents a significant gap in how the industry approaches contaminated sites.

The challenge of building site history

For decades, environmental consultants have assembled site histories through manual document review. The process typically involves reading through reports, extracting key dates and findings into spreadsheets, and constructing timelines by hand. Some teams rename files with date prefixes to create a sortable document list—a practical workaround, though one that compromises chain of custody by altering the original file names.

This approach served the industry well when sites had dozens of documents. Today, complex sites routinely involve hundreds or thousands of historical files spanning multiple decades of ownership, investigations, and regulatory interactions.

When a site has 14,000 documents, comprehensive manual review simply isn’t feasible. Teams must filter—selecting documents that appear most relevant, then reviewing those for actionable data. Each filtering decision represents a judgment call, and each judgment call introduces risk. The documents that didn’t make the cut may contain exactly the information needed to establish liability, identify responsible parties, or understand contamination sources.

We’ve all experienced the frustration of knowing we’ve seen a particular piece of information (a spill record, an ownership transfer, a regulatory notice) without being able to locate it again. Hours spent searching for something we’ve already read represents time that could be spent on higher-value analysis.

A new approach to site history

Statvis approaches this challenge differently. Rather than relying on manual extraction, our platform reads documents as they’re uploaded and identifies significant events described within them: investigations, sampling campaigns, contamination discoveries, remediation activities, regulatory interactions, and ownership changes.

The distinction between document dates and event dates matters here. A remediation report from 2008 might describe contamination first identified in 1985, cleanup activities conducted between 1992 and 1996, and monitoring data from the following decade. That single document contains a dozen discrete events, each occurring at different points in the site’s history. Our timeline captures all of them, with direct links back to the specific pages where each event is documented.

As new documents are added to a site, the timeline updates automatically. There’s no need to revisit spreadsheets or manually integrate new findings with existing records.

What this means for environmental teams

Complete visibility across all documents. Every uploaded document gets processed—no pre-filtering required. Events that might have been missed in a manual review become visible and searchable.

Traceable sources for every event. Each timeline entry links directly to its source document and page number. When a regulator asks about a 1997 release, you can navigate to the exact documentation within seconds rather than searching through files.

Shared understanding across teams. Legal counsel, environmental consultants, and clients all work from the same factual record. Discussions shift from “I think I remember seeing something about that” to specific, documented events with clear provenance.

Preserved document integrity. Source files remain exactly as provided. The timeline represents an analytical layer built on top of the original documents, maintaining chain of custody while enabling efficient navigation.

Transforming historical documents from liability to asset

We often hear from clients that their historical document archives feel like a burden: boxes in storage, folders accumulating on servers, material too voluminous to review comprehensively. The concern is what might be in them that no one has found yet.

In litigation, this uncertainty creates real exposure. Opposing parties can surface documents or details that weren’t identified during review—not through any failure of diligence, but simply because comprehensive manual review at scale isn’t achievable.

We built Statvis Timeline because we believe environmental professionals deserve tools that match the complexity of their work. When site history becomes navigable rather than buried, those historical documents transform from a source of uncertainty into evidence that supports your analysis and protects your clients.