A message to drycleaners:
"You may have millions of dollars you didn't know about stored right on your property"
Linda Thornburg
Associate Editor
Textile Rental Magazine

Those quotes are from a recent interview you may have seen in Textile Rental Magazine as Mr. Henshaw explained that policies written before 1972 or 1973 don't have the same exclusions for pollution as current policies contain."That means that if you ever did any dry-cleaning at your plant and had harmful solvents that leaked into the ground, there is a good chance you could use insurance to cover the cost of the investigation ... and the legal fees incurred in negotiating a cleanup settlement-if the policy was written before 1972. Even if the policy was written between 1972 and 1985/86, you might be able to use it to pay for the investigation and legal costs, as policies written during that period covered accidents that caused environmental damage," wrote Thornburg.

"In almost every instance, if you were running a dry-cleaning business you would have experienced an accidental spill or sudden release of dry-cleaning solvents. These spills and releases, more times than not, have caused some amount of soil and/or groundwater contamination. It doesn't take very much solvent to create an environmental problem," Henshaw told Textile Rental.

Using 'insurance archeology' techniques, Policy Find can recover evidence of old policies, if not the policies themselves. Henshaw talked about his company being in business to make sure properties remain assets for their owners, not liabilities.

"Often the cost of the site investigation and clean-up is more than what the property is worth. Some people bury their heads in the sand and hope that by ignoring the problem of solvents leaking into the groundwater, they won't have to deal with it. And some states are lax with their environmental regulations and that may be OK temporarily from a business perspective. But when these people go to sell the property, the buyer will conduct a due diligence that can be expensive for the current owner. If evidence is found of contamination, there is a legal requirement to report it, and then drycleaners or other business owners will be subject to all of the legal requirements of cleanup."

Enviro Forensics was started in the 1980s as a full service environmental consulting firm that began specializing in finding old insurance policies to offset cleanup costs for drycleaners and other in the laudry industry. That service led to the establishment of a new division called Policy Find that reconstructs insurance coverage for companies facing any type of long-tail (or long term) claim which typically include environmental issues, employee misconduct, or product liability. "We also work with municipalities to cleanup contaminated brownfield sites to bring communities back to life," said Henshaw. The CEO has personally been involved with hundreds of drycleaners, drycleaning sites and site closures, as well as dozens of sites targeted for cleanup by municipalities.