☎ (888) 264-7050
Kansas Cleanup Sites Get Rechecked Every Five Years. In October 2026, One Came Back "Not Protective" Over Vapor Intrusion.
← Back to Blog Environmental

Kansas Cleanup Sites Get Rechecked Every Five Years. In October 2026, One Came Back "Not Protective" Over Vapor Intrusion.

Two of eight EPA Region 7 five-year reviews came back not protective in October 2026, one of them in Kansas. What the category means and what a Phase I misses.

by iSi Environmental

A Phase I Environmental Site Assessment can satisfy every element of all appropriate inquiries and still tell a buyer nothing about the pathway most likely to reach the building. EPA recognizes ASTM E1527-21 as satisfying AAI (87 FR 76578, effective February 13, 2023). That standard has the assessor evaluate vapor migration as a potential recognized environmental condition. It requires no soil gas sampling and no indoor air sampling. The liability shield and the exposure question get answered by two different scopes of work, and only one of them is inside a Phase I.

On October 1, 2026 that gap acquired a Kansas address. EPA Region 7 announced the completion of eight five-year reviews and the start of seven more across Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa (EPA Region 7). Two of the eight came back “not protective.” One of those two is Chemical Commodities, Inc. in Olathe, and the live issue there is vapor intrusion. EPA says its site team “continues to work with the potentially responsible parties to delineate the extent of contaminated groundwater plume migration,” and that the agency conducts “vapor intrusion testing; inspect[s] vapor intrusion mitigation systems (VIMS); and install[s] VIMS where needed.” A public meeting is planned.

EPA’s Fourth Five-Year Review for the Coleman operable unit of the 29th and Mead site in Wichita states why it skipped the public: “Interviews were not conducted with the general public for this FYR since the EPA had not received any complaints or concerns from the public or businesses adjacent to the Site.” KDHE’s first five-year review for the North Industrial Corridor, the larger Kansas-led site that surrounds it, records that the legal notice “was not published.” Two agencies, two reviews, the same ground in north Wichita, and the same outcome for anyone who lives or operates on it.

That is the practical shape of a five-year review at a contaminated site in Kansas. It is the recurring recheck a lead agency runs on a cleanup that is finished and operating, and it is the only regular public statement about whether the remedy next door is still doing its job. It carries no comment period. The one documented way a property owner gets into the record is to ask to be interviewed, in writing, before the review closes.

Does a Phase I ESA that satisfies All Appropriate Inquiries include vapor sampling?

No. EPA recognizes ASTM E1527-21 as satisfying all appropriate inquiries (87 FR 76578, effective February 13, 2023), and E1527-21 has vapor migration considered as a potential recognized environmental condition. AAI itself requires no subsurface sampling and no indoor-air sampling. A buyer can hold a fully compliant Phase I and still have an entirely unassessed vapor pathway.

Anyone claiming bona fide prospective purchaser, contiguous property owner or innocent landowner protection under CERCLA has to have conducted all appropriate inquiries. That is what the Phase I buys. It is a procedural qualification for a liability defense, and the regulatory floor for it was never written to answer the question a tenant asks, which is whether the air inside this building is affected by the plume under it.

So the compliance standard and the protection standard have come apart. A practitioner who sells “AAI-compliant” as equivalent to “vapor risk addressed” is overselling the document, and a buyer who hears it that way is under-protected on the one pathway that reaches a structure without anybody drilling a well. The fix is procurement language rather than a different standard: if the pathway matters on a deal, the vapor scope gets commissioned separately and in writing, typically as a Phase II with sub-slab soil gas and indoor-air points, before closing rather than after.

This is also the reason a five-year review announcement is worth reading as a buyer and not only as a neighbor. The review tells you how EPA currently characterizes the remedy next door. Your Phase I will not tell you what that characterization means for the slab you are about to own.

Which EPA Region 7 sites were found not protective in the October 2026 review cycle?

Two of the eight completed reviews EPA Region 7 announced on October 1, 2026: Chemical Commodities, Inc. in Olathe, Kansas, and Minker/Stout/Romaine Creek in Imperial, Missouri (EPA Region 7). Strother Field Industrial Park in Winfield, Kansas, and Ogallala Groundwater in Nebraska were deferred, which is a different finding. Ralston in Iowa and Weldon Spring Quarry/Plant/Pits in Missouri were protective in the short term.

The full breakdown of the eight is worth keeping straight, because the determination is the part that gets flattened in coverage:

  • Not protective: Chemical Commodities, Inc. (Olathe, KS); Minker/Stout/Romaine Creek (Imperial, MO).
  • Protectiveness deferred: Strother Field Industrial Park (Winfield, KS); Ogallala Groundwater (Ogallala, NE).
  • Protective in the short term: Ralston (Cedar Rapids, IA); Weldon Spring Quarry/Plant/Pits (St. Charles, MO).
  • Mixed by operable unit: Former Blaine Naval Ammunition Depot (Hastings, NE), protective at OU4 and OU16, deferred at OU14.
  • Protective: Railroad Avenue (West Des Moines, IA).

Six of the eight were protective, short-term protective, or deferred. A post that reads the October 1 announcement as evidence of systemic remedy failure is misreading its own source. The honest reading is that the recurring review caught two remedies that had drifted, which is the job the review exists to do.

Two details get mangled regularly. Strother Field in Winfield is deferred, not not-protective, and EPA says additional sampling comes before it will issue a protectiveness statement there. And the cycle produced more than two kinds of answer: two sites landed on short-term protective and one federal facility split by operable unit, protective at two units and deferred at a third. The Olathe public meeting on the findings is described as planned, with no date in the October 1 release, so watch the site profile rather than waiting for a notice.

The numbers at the largest Kansas example are moving the right way

Start with the trend, because it runs against the way this subject usually gets written. At the North Industrial Corridor in Wichita, PCE and TCE in groundwater have fallen from greater than 1,000 µg/L to less than 100 µg/L, driven by source control and natural attenuation (City of Wichita). In 2022 the City reported just under 155 million gallons of groundwater extracted for treatment, with four additional wells turned on that January.

The site is large. The City puts it at 4,011 acres, roughly four miles long by a mile and a half wide. KDHE and EPA both describe it as extending over 4,000 acres (KDHE; EPA Fourth Five-Year Review). KDHE describes the footprint as mixed industrial, commercial, residential, recreational, and agricultural property, which is the detail most people miss about a site they picture as an industrial district.

Improvement and unresolved exposure are both true here. As of 2022 the City reported roughly 139 acres of the shallow aquifer and roughly 695 acres of the deep aquifer still above drinking water standards. Vapor intrusion was assessed as its own pathway rather than assumed away, with KDHE approving the vapor intrusion reports in August 2012 and June 2014 (KDHE). A pathway that gets its own documented evaluation is the system working.

Two agencies share the same ground and the same load-bearing control

Five of the six operable units of the former 29th and Mead Superfund site are managed by KDHE and the City of Wichita. OU2, the Coleman operable unit, is 1,440 acres, sits inside the North Industrial Corridor footprint, and remains EPA-lead (EPA Fourth Five-Year Review).

The two are linked rather than opposed. EPA’s Fourth Five-Year Review states that “No groundwater or soil institutional control (IC) is required by the 1992 ROD for OU2,” and that the protection instead comes from City of Wichita Municipal Code Title 7, Chapter 7.30, Section 7.30.105, which prohibits new water wells in contaminated areas. That is the same ordinance carrying the site-wide control across the North Industrial Corridor. The report also delegates the unit’s final controls back to the state document: “Institutional controls associated with the final groundwater remedy will be covered by the NIC Corrective Action Decision document.”

So the load-bearing protection across thousands of acres in Wichita is a municipal ordinance rather than a recorded deed restriction. A city council can amend an ordinance without an environmental proceeding. That is a different risk profile than an instrument recorded against a parcel, and it is worth knowing which one stands between a property and a drilled well.

What is a five-year review of a contaminated site?

A five-year review is a recurring re-evaluation of a completed cleanup, required where contamination remains on site. 40 CFR 300.430(f)(4)(ii) requires the lead agency to “review such action no less than every five years after the initiation of the selected remedial action.” It evaluates whether the remedy still protects health and the environment. It is not a new cleanup decision.

The statutory root is CERCLA §121(c), codified at 42 U.S.C. §9621(c), which directs that where a remedial action leaves hazardous substances at a site, the remedy is reviewed “no less often than each five years after the initiation of such remedial action to assure that human health and the environment are being protected” (EPA). The National Contingency Plan carries the same duty in regulation.

Read the distinction carefully, because it drives everything else. The question a review answers is whether the remedy is still working, not whether the site is clean. Those are different questions with different evidence behind them.

What triggers a five-year review, and does every cleaned-up site get one?

No. The trigger is contamination left in place. 40 CFR 300.430(f)(4)(ii) applies only where hazardous substances remain “above levels that allow for unlimited use and unrestricted exposure.” A site cleaned to unrestricted-use standards gets no recurring review, which is why the absence of a five-year review is not by itself good news or bad news.

EPA frames the obligation as arising from CERCLA “or program policy,” and notes that reviews “can be performed by EPA or the lead agency for a site,” with EPA keeping responsibility for the protectiveness determination at Superfund sites (EPA). The trigger follows the contamination, not the program the site happens to sit in.

For a buyer, the useful reading is that a site with no five-year review either finished clean or never had a remedy that left anything behind. Establish which one before treating silence as a clearance.

Does KDHE have a five-year review policy for Kansas sites?

No. The KDHE Bureau of Environmental Remediation policy index runs BER-RS-001 through BER-RS-058 and contains no five-year review policy, verified by direct reading of the BER Policies index on August 26, 2026. On State Cooperative Program sites the obligation flows from the site’s own decision document and the NCP standard it adopts, not from Kansas statute or regulation.

The nearest relatives in the series govern adjacent work: BER-RS-036 covers scope of work for site monitoring, BER-RS-024 covers site closure in the State Cooperative Program, and BER-RS-009 covers decision document development. None of them establishes a review interval.

This matters when someone tells you what Kansas “requires” on a state-lead site. The requirement lives in the site file. At the North Industrial Corridor that is the Final Corrective Action Decision for Interim Groundwater Remediation, approved in March 2012 (KDHE). Pull the decision document, not the news release.

Can the public comment on a Kansas five-year review?

No comment period exists. Unlike a KDHE Agency Decision Statement or Corrective Action Decision, a five-year review is a technical re-evaluation with no statutory comment right, no hearing right and no appeal. The one documented channel is the review’s interview process, which the lead agency conducts at its discretion.

The contrast is the story. KDHE attaches a 15-day comment period to a draft Agency Decision Statement, and that window is a real procedural right with a written agency response behind it. A five-year review has no equivalent. It is an agency self-evaluation of its own remedy, and the public record it produces is a report rather than a docket.

Which puts the whole weight on the interview. Both reviews covering the Wichita ground went forward without public interviews, one because no complaints had come in and one because the legal notice was not published. A discretionary channel closes itself when nobody uses it. If you own or operate on a site with a review underway, send a written request to the project manager asking to be interviewed, and send it before the review closes rather than after the report posts.

What does a “protectiveness determination” actually mean?

It is a formal category, and the wording matters more than the summary. EPA’s Fourth Five-Year Review for the Coleman OU concluded “Short-term Protective,” not “Protective,” stating the remedy “is protective of human health and the environment in the short term” while “long-term protectiveness will be completed through the establishment of an Institutional Control for contaminated soil.”

Sit with what that means. The determination is conditional on a control that the same report says does not exist yet. A property owner who reads only the headline sentence walks away thinking the file is closed.

The categories are the fastest quality check available on any review. Find the determination, read the exact category, then find the condition attached to it.

What does a “not protective” five-year review determination actually mean?

“Not protective” is a specific EPA category. Under OSWER Directive 9355.7-18 (September 13, 2011) it applies where implementation of required controls is incomplete and exposures are occurring. It is distinct from “protectiveness is deferred,” which means EPA lacks the information to decide. Under 42 U.S.C. 9621(c), a finding that action is appropriate obliges EPA to take or require that action.

The guidance permits five determinations. EPA’s institutional-controls supplement to the five-year review guidance sets them out as “Protective,” “Will be protective once the remedy is completed,” “Protective in the short-term,” “Not protective,” and “Protectiveness is deferred” (OSWER 9355.7-18). The two that change anything for a neighbor or a buyer are the last two, and they are the two most often treated as interchangeable. Deferred means the agency cannot yet say. Not protective means the agency has said, and the answer was no.

The statutory consequence is what separates the categories in practice. 42 U.S.C. 9621(c) provides that if on review the judgment is that action is appropriate under section 9604 or 9606, “the President shall take or require such action.” A not-protective finding sits on the far side of that trigger. A deferred finding sits before it, waiting on sampling.

The conditional categories describe different confidence levels. “Protectiveness Deferred” means no determination could be made: the 2015 Third Five-Year Review for the Coleman OU stated protectiveness “cannot be determined at this time until further information is obtained.” “Short-term protective” means the remedy works now but long-term protection depends on unfinished conditions. Only “protective” is unconditional.

Both of the conditional categories appear in the record for the same operable unit five years apart, which is a useful thing to know before assuming a category is a formality. EPA’s chronology for the unit gives a first review in September 2005, a second in September 2010, and a third in September 2015, with the fourth covering the review period of September 22, 2015 through August 28, 2020 (EPA Fourth Five-Year Review).

Track the category across reviews rather than reading one in isolation. A movement from deferred to short-term protective tells you something. A single snapshot does not.

Does a “not protective” finding mean contamination is spreading onto my property?

Not on its own. At Olathe the finding accompanies ongoing work “to delineate the extent of contaminated groundwater plume migration,” which means the boundary is still being established rather than shown to cross any particular parcel (EPA Region 7). EPA reports public drinking water at that site is not impacted. Vapor intrusion is assessed building by building.

The determination is a statement about the remedy, not a map. It says the controls EPA relied on are not fully in place and exposure is occurring somewhere inside the scope of the review. It does not say which structures, and the public release does not identify them. That is the gap a property owner feels most sharply, and it is also the gap that a site-specific assessment is built to close.

Read it as a reason to establish your own building’s status rather than as evidence about it. The pathway is slab-specific: two buildings fifty feet apart over the same plume can produce different indoor air results because of foundation construction, utility penetrations, depth to groundwater and how the building is ventilated. A determination at the site level cannot resolve that, and nobody at the agency is going to resolve it parcel by parcel on your schedule.

How does vapor intrusion get from a groundwater plume into a building?

Volatile organic compounds partition out of contaminated groundwater or soil into soil gas, migrate through the unsaturated zone, and enter a building through slab cracks, utility penetrations and sumps, driven by pressure differences. Kansas Vapor Intrusion Guidance treats the pathway as credible where contamination sits within about 40 feet of the surface and a building is within about 100 feet laterally.

That envelope is a screen and not a boundary. It tells an assessor where the pathway is likely to be complete enough to warrant sampling. A building just outside it is not cleared, and a building just inside it is not condemned. What the envelope does is decide whether the question gets asked at all, which is why the plume’s current delineation matters more than the delineation in a decision document written two decades ago.

The mechanics also explain why a single indoor-air sample is weak evidence on its own. Indoor air carries contributions from consumer products, attached garages and outdoor air, so a result above a screening level does not by itself identify the subsurface as the source. Paired sub-slab soil gas points are what let an assessor attribute the indoor concentration to the plume rather than to the paint cabinet. EPA’s OSWER Technical Guide for Assessing and Mitigating the Vapor Intrusion Pathway (June 2015) is the federal reference for how that work is structured.

Pressure is the part people skip. A building under negative pressure relative to the subsurface pulls soil gas through every opening in the slab, and HVAC operation, stack effect in winter, and exhaust fans all move that pressure around during the year. One sampling event in one season is a snapshot of a pathway that changes.

What indoor-air TCE concentration triggers mitigation in EPA Region 7?

Region 7’s Revised Vapor Intrusion Risk Management Decision Matrix (February 2, 2017) sets TCE indoor-air action levels of 2 µg/m³ for residential exposure and 6 µg/m³ for industrial or commercial exposure on an 8-hour workday basis. Mitigation is warranted where the HIGH risk category is reached, meaning cancer risk above 1E-04 or a Hazard Index above 1, in sub-slab soil gas or in indoor air.

Two numbers and one trigger, and the distance between the residential and the workplace value is the detail that moves a decision. A concentration that sits comfortably under the commercial action level in a warehouse would be above the residential action level in the apartment next door. Change of use is therefore a vapor question: converting industrial space to residential or mixed use moves the building from one column of the matrix to the other without anything in the subsurface changing.

Describe the matrix accurately when you cite it. It is a risk-management tool Region 7 uses to decide its own response at the sites it oversees. It does not by itself impose a sampling or mitigation duty on a private property owner, and anyone telling a building owner that the matrix “requires” them to act is describing something the document does not do. The obligation on a private party comes from a decision document, an order, a lease, a loan covenant, or a transaction, and the matrix is the yardstick those instruments tend to borrow.

The four states in the October 2026 cycle all sit in Region 7, so these are the numbers in play at the federal sites in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa alike.

Do Kansas’s vapor intrusion rules differ from EPA’s?

Yes, in scope and in reference values. KDHE’s Bureau of Environmental Remediation issues the Kansas Vapor Intrusion Guidance (August 2016), which draws indoor-air Tier 2 levels from Appendix A of the Risk-based Standards for Kansas Manual rather than adopting EPA’s screening-level output directly. The RSK Manual applies to properties in state cleanup programs. A federal NPL site in Kansas runs on EPA’s numbers.

That split produces an outcome that surprises people who assume one state has one number. A property sitting between a Kansas State Cooperative Program site and a federal NPL site can face two different indoor-air reference values depending on which file an assessment is written into. The screening envelope in the Kansas guidance, roughly 40 feet vertical and 100 feet lateral, is doing the same job as the Region 7 matrix’s risk categories at a different point in the process.

The guidance is guidance. KDHE issues it to structure how the pathway gets evaluated in its own programs, and the RSK Manual states its own applicability limit, so a private party outside a state cleanup program is not placed under a Kansas sampling mandate by either document. What both do give you is a defensible basis for scoping work, which is the practical use of a reference value in a transaction.

Who pays to install a vapor intrusion mitigation system?

At a Superfund site with identified potentially responsible parties, response costs including VIMS installation are pursued against those parties. EPA states that at Olathe it conducts vapor intrusion testing, inspects vapor intrusion mitigation systems, and installs them “where needed” while working with the potentially responsible parties (EPA Region 7). Maintenance in practice falls to the building occupant.

EPA’s Olathe site materials put maintenance responsibility on residents and ask that the agency be notified when systems shut off or experience other malfunctions (EPA site profile). That split between who installs and who maintains is the whole failure mode. A sub-slab depressurization system is a fan, a riser and a pressure gauge. It stops working when the fan is unplugged during a remodel, when the gauge reads zero and nobody looks at it, or when a tenant turns it off because it is noisy. An installed and ignored system is what produces a not-protective finding five years later.

For a commercial owner that makes the system an operating item rather than a one-time capital event. Put the fan on the preventive maintenance schedule, record the pressure readings, and keep the records where a buyer’s consultant can find them. For a buyer, the existence of a system on a building is not a problem disclosed and solved. It is a control whose performance history you now need, and the absence of that history is itself a finding.

Who is responsible for a five-year review at a Kansas State Cooperative Program site?

KDHE. The State Cooperative Program was established in 1991 “to address complex, higher priority contaminated sites that are not in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund Program,” and KDHE provides the technical oversight (KDHE). Where an EPA-lead operable unit sits inside the same geography, EPA reviews that unit separately and retains its own protectiveness determination.

Wichita is the working illustration of that split. One geography, one shared municipal ordinance, and two lead agencies producing separate reviews on separate schedules for parcels that a resident would describe as the same neighborhood.

Confirm the lead agency before you go looking for documents. Searching EPA’s system for a KDHE-lead site returns nothing, and the reverse is equally unhelpful.

How do I find out if my property is inside a contaminated site boundary in Kansas?

Check KDHE’s Identified Sites List and the Kansas Environmental Interest Finder against the parcel, then search the county register of deeds for a recorded Environmental Use Control. The two answer different questions. Note that the Identified Sites List expressly excludes underground and above-ground storage tank sites, so a petroleum release will not appear.

That exclusion is KDHE’s own language, and it is the reason the list cannot stand as diligence on its own. KDHE describes it as a tool that aids due diligence. A gasoline release on the adjoining parcel can be entirely absent from it.

The deed record is the half that binds. The Identified Sites List tells you a site exists nearby. Only the recorded instrument tells you whether something attaches to the parcel you are buying, and only one of those two facts survives a closing.

What is an Environmental Use Control and does it bind me if I buy the property?

Yes. Under K.S.A. 65-1,222(b) an environmental use control “runs with the property and is binding on the owner and subsequent owners, lessees and other users of the land.” It is recorded with the county register of deeds. Typical restrictions bar well drilling, soil-cap disturbance, or residential use, and they reach a buyer who never negotiated them.

The statute also frames why the control exists: it is issued “as requested by the property owner at the time of issuance” to ensure future protection “when environmental contamination which exceeds department standards for unrestricted use remains on the property.” Other common terms require notification during utility excavation and prohibit disturbing an engineered cap.

Oversight sits with KDHE’s Long-Term Stewardship and Brownfields Unit, which provides oversight of the Environmental Use Control program and also reviews and processes Certificate of Liability Release applications. One governance note worth carrying: the only EUC-specific policy in the BER series, BER-RS-051, “Guidelines for Category 1 Properties in the Environmental Use Control Program,” is listed as Rescinded on the BER Policies index. The reason for the rescission is not stated in the published record, so read it as a fact about the policy set rather than as a verdict on the program.

I’m buying or financing property near a Superfund site. What should the assessment cover?

Beyond an AAI-compliant Phase I: the plume’s current delineation rather than the record-of-decision boundary, the most recent five-year review determination broken out by operable unit, any land use controls or environmental use controls that run with the land, and, where the building falls inside the vapor screening envelope, a Phase II with sub-slab soil gas and indoor-air points scoped explicitly.

Taking those in order. Current delineation comes from the most recent monitoring data in the site file, and at a site like Olathe where EPA says the extent of plume migration is still being delineated, the honest answer on a given parcel may be that the boundary is open. That is information. It tells a lender that the question is live rather than closed.

The determination has to be read by operable unit. Former Blaine Naval Ammunition Depot in Hastings came back protective at OU4 and OU16 and deferred at OU14 in the same October 2026 cycle. A site-level summary would have hidden that. So would a press release.

Use controls are the half that binds the next owner. In Kansas an environmental use control is recorded with the county register of deeds and runs with the property, which is covered in detail further down this post. The five-year review tells you whether the control exists and whether EPA or KDHE believes it is working. The register of deeds tells you whether it attaches to your parcel.

And the vapor scope stands on its own line in the proposal, with the sample locations, the media, the analytical method and the comparison values named. A scope that says “vapor migration will be evaluated” and nothing more is the AAI language, and it buys the liability defense without answering the exposure question.

What happens if a five-year review finds a problem?

The review issues a formal Issue with a Recommendation, a named responsible party, an oversight party and a milestone date. EPA’s Fourth Five-Year Review for the Coleman OU recorded “There are no soil restrictions for OU2” and recommended establishing a control restricting residential land use, with a milestone date of 3/31/2021. Findings generate obligations for the responsible party, not for neighbors.

The Issues and Recommendations table is the single most useful page in any five-year review and the one most often skipped. Open items with a past-due milestone date are the fastest read on whether a site is being actively managed.

At the North Industrial Corridor the responsible-party picture is mixed. EPA’s Fourth Five-Year Review records that “Three of the RPs have source areas that are still being investigated and the remedy has not begun. Eleven of the RPs have remedies that are currently being implemented, and eight RPs have remedies that have met their Remedial Action Objectives.” A single site boundary can hold parcels at three different stages of cleanup at the same time.

What penalty can EPA impose if a responsible party ignores a cleanup order?

A person who without sufficient cause willfully violates or fails to comply with a CERCLA section 106 order may be fined up to $25,000 for each day of non-compliance under 42 U.S.C. 9606(b)(1), adjusted for inflation to $71,545 per day under 40 CFR 19.4 (effective January 8, 2025). CERCLA 109(b) and (c) penalties run to $71,545 and $214,637 per violation.

Section 106 abatement authority attaches where EPA determines there may be an imminent and substantial endangerment. The daily exposure is what gives an order its weight, and it runs against responsible parties rather than against neighbors. Nothing in a five-year review creates a penalty exposure for an adjoining owner, which is worth stating plainly because the word “Superfund” on a nearby parcel tends to produce the opposite assumption.

On the public record, EPA’s posture at these sites is remedial. At Olathe the agency describes working with the potentially responsible parties on plume delineation and on mitigation systems, and the October 1 release names no party and carries no penalty figure. No published enforcement action at any of the eight completed-review sites turned up in the research behind this update. Treat the announcement as what it is, a five-year review cycle, and do not read an enforcement push into it.

A new five-year review just started at a site near me. What happens, and when?

A started review has no determination. EPA opened seven on October 1, 2026, including John’s Sludge Pond in Wichita, Fort Riley in Junction City and Conservation Chemical Company in Kansas City, Missouri (EPA Region 7). The review assesses whether the existing remedy remains protective and ends in one of the five protectiveness statements, with issues and recommendations attached.

The seven newly started reviews are John’s Sludge Pond (Wichita, KS), Fort Riley (Junction City, KS), Conservation Chemical Company (Kansas City, MO), Former Nebraska Ordnance Plant (Mead, NE), Oronogo-Duenweg Mining Belt (Jasper County, MO), Solid State Circuits (Republic, MO) and Syntex Facility (Verona, MO). None of them has a finding. Reading one into a start notice is the most common error in coverage of these announcements, and it is the error most likely to end up in a transaction memo.

EPA published no target completion date for any of the seven in the October 1 release, so there is no schedule to quote here. What a start notice does give you is timing of a different kind. A review in progress is the only window in which the interview channel described earlier in this post has anywhere to land. If you own or operate inside one of those site boundaries, the written request to be interviewed goes in now, while the review is open, and it goes to the project manager for that site.

How do I find the five-year review report for a site near me?

Start with EPA’s Superfund site profile for the site and EPA’s five-year review search page. Then budget for failure: EPA’s Office of Inspector General found in report 25-N-0022 (March 26, 2025) that more than half of federal-facility five-year reviews are not publicly available, despite EPA’s annual reports to Congress stating they can be found there.

The practical sequence is short. Find the site profile, which carries the site identifier and the document library, as at Chemical Commodities, Inc. in Olathe. Pull the most recent five-year review report rather than the news release, because the determination language, the operable-unit breakdown and the issues and recommendations table only exist in the report. If the report is not there, the next step is a records request, and on a federal facility that is more likely than most people expect.

For a Kansas state-lead site the route is different, since the document lives in the KDHE site file rather than in EPA’s system. Confirm the lead agency first. Searching EPA’s system for a KDHE-lead site returns nothing useful, and the reverse is just as unproductive.

The accessibility problem is also an argument about where to spend your money. A warning system whose output you cannot reliably retrieve is not a substitute for commissioning your own assessment on a specific parcel, particularly when the question is vapor and the answer is building-specific.

How reliable is the five-year review as a warning system?

Less than it appears. EPA’s own Inspector General concluded in March 2025 that “this review frequency may not accurately reflect site conditions” and that “violations of the institutional controls may also continue in the interim.” At one site, trespassing and camping in violation of restrictive covenants had continued “since at least March 2007.”

The documentation behind the reviews is thinner than most people assume. Report 25-E-0020, dated March 19, 2025, found that of 70 sites reviewed, 15 of the 29 with implemented institutional controls had no institutional control data in EPA’s tracking module, covering about $483 million in IIJA funds. For sites with planned controls the figure was 41 of 52, or 79 percent, covering about $956 million. Staff in four of ten regions said they do not update the module for any site milestone at all.

The five-year review is also carrying more weight than it was built for. In the three regions that do maintain the data, OIG found staff “reported entering the data during each five-year review,” and that without a manual review of individual site documents “there is no way to determine whether documents are missing.” EPA agreed with four of five recommendations and disagreed with the fifth, which asked the agency to make its system capable of tracking planned institutional controls. That recommendation remains formally unresolved, with EPA’s stated position that “public awareness and oversight of ICs does not depend on internal information included in SEMS.”

Retrievability is its own problem, separate from what the reviews contain. In report 25-N-0022, dated March 26, 2025, the OIG found that more than half of federal-facility five-year reviews are not publicly available, even though EPA’s annual reports to Congress state they can be found on the agency’s five-year review search page. That matters to anyone relying on the public record for a transaction decision on ground near a federal facility, and it is an argument for a site-specific assessment rather than a document search.

No comparable audit exists at the Kansas level. Nothing published by KDHE or Kansas Legislative Post Audit addresses five-year review timeliness or institutional control enforcement, so treat the federal finding as a federal finding rather than as a description of Kansas practice.

My site’s review is late. Does that mean something is wrong?

Not necessarily, and a late review is not itself evidence of a problem with the remedy. Reviews slip for scheduling and resourcing reasons that the public record usually does not explain. Read the last completed review’s protectiveness category and its open recommendations rather than inferring anything from the gap between reviews.

The last completed report is the better document anyway. It states the determination, the condition attached to it, and every open recommendation with its milestone date. A gap in the calendar tells you nothing that page does not tell you better.

If the delay concerns you, use it. A review in progress is the window where an interview request has somewhere to land.

What a property owner should actually do

There is no compliance obligation on a neighboring owner and no penalty attached to a five-year review. It imposes no duty on you, so there is no fine, no citation, and nothing that runs against your property because of it. The financial exposure on this topic sits in a different instrument entirely, the recorded Environmental Use Control that binds whoever owns the land next.

Eight steps, in order:

  1. Locate the site and confirm the lead agency. State Cooperative Program sites are KDHE-lead and NPL sites are EPA-lead, and a single geography can hold both.
  2. Pull the governing decision document rather than the news release. On a State Cooperative site, that document is what establishes the review obligation.
  3. Read the most recent five-year review for its protectiveness statement and its exact category.
  4. Check the Issues and Recommendations table for open items with a past-due milestone date.
  5. Search the county register of deeds for a recorded Environmental Use Control on the specific parcel. Site-wide controls and parcel-specific controls are different instruments with different reach.
  6. If a control exists, identify who enforces it. In Kansas that is KDHE’s Long-Term Stewardship and Brownfields Unit.
  7. Ask to be interviewed. On a five-year review this is the only documented input channel, it is discretionary, and it is the step to take before the review closes.
  8. If the building sits inside the vapor screening envelope, scope sub-slab soil gas and indoor air separately. A Phase I that satisfies all appropriate inquiries does not cover it.

On cleanup numbers, Kansas standards come from the Risk-based Standards for Kansas (RSK) Manual, 6th version, which describes the process for setting chemical-specific and site-specific cleanup goals for soil, groundwater, and indoor air. For a contaminant with a federal primary MCL, the Tier 2 groundwater cleanup concentration equals the MCL for both residential and non-residential land use. That is the yardstick a consultant is applying when they tell you a residual concentration is acceptable.

How the neighboring states handle the same phase

Missouri handles the same phase through long-term stewardship. The state’s Brownfields and Voluntary Cleanup Program provides that where residual contamination is safely left on a property after a certificate of completion is issued, “an environmental covenant is placed in the property chain-of-title and the site enters long-term stewardship,” which the program defines to include “inspection, maintenance, information management and distribution and public awareness” (Missouri DNR). The instrument differs from a Kansas EUC in name, but the shape is the same: a recorded restriction plus an ongoing maintenance obligation that outlives the cleanup itself.

Nebraska’s Voluntary Cleanup Program was established in 1995 by the Remedial Action Plan Monitoring Act and concludes with a No Further Action letter (Nebraska DEE). Oklahoma’s post-remedy review mechanics are left out of this post because we did not verify them against a primary source, and an unverified comparison is worse than no comparison.

All four states in the October 2026 review cycle sit in EPA Region 7, so the Region 7 action levels described above govern the federal sites in each of them. State program numbers are a different matter. Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma state-specific indoor-air action levels were not resolved to primary sources for this update, so no state-by-state comparison table appears here. An unverified table of numbers is worse than no table.

Where this leaves you

The instrument that governs a Kansas site after the remedy is built is the site’s own decision document, and the recurring public output is a report with no comment period attached. Contamination at the largest example in the state is measurably down, which is real. The same file also shows 695 acres of deep aquifer above drinking water standards, a protectiveness determination conditioned on a control that had not been established, and a load-bearing restriction that lives in a city ordinance. Both halves belong in the same sentence.

The October 2026 cycle adds one more thing to carry. A Kansas site came back not protective on a vapor pathway, a review opened in Wichita with no finding attached to it, and the document that buys a buyer a liability defense is not the document that answers whether vapor is reaching a slab. Those are separate purchases on the same deal.

Getting into that record takes a written interview request sent while a review is open. Understanding what the record already says about a specific parcel takes a file review, and that is the same work that supports a defensible transaction position.

iSi Environmental runs Phase I Environmental Site Assessments to the ASTM E1527-21 standard, including the agency file review that shows whether a parcel sits inside a site boundary, whether a recorded use control attaches to it, and what the last protectiveness determination said. Where that file review puts a building inside the vapor screening envelope, the next step is a Phase II with sub-slab soil gas and indoor-air points scoped against the right action level, which is the work the Phase I is not built to do. If you own, operate, or are buying near a Kansas remediation site, start with the file review and decide the vapor scope from what it shows. Talk to our team →

We Plug In. You Level Up.

Sources

Tags: