ERNS

The federal record of reported releases: spill and release notifications made to the National Response Center (oil, chemicals, hazardous substances), historically compiled as the Emergency Response Notification System. A record is created by a phone call. Anyone required to report a release, or choosing to, generates an entry.

In a Phase I ESA

The ASTM E1527-21 search scope is subject property only.

ERNS entries are raw incident reports, not investigations. One entry may be a transformer leak fully cleaned up the same day. Another may be the first documented evidence of a release nobody followed up on. The useful fields are the date, the material, the quantity, and the narrative. The useful follow-up is whether any regulatory file (state spills program, tank program) shows what happened next. Multiple ERNS entries at one facility over years is a pattern worth noting in the report.

Reports are address- and caller-described, so geocoding is imperfect. Confirm an entry actually pertains to the subject property before carrying it into findings.

Where the data lives

National Response Center incident data is public. Data vendors compile and geocode it as ERNS.