mes_all

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Keywords
Theme: Soil and ground water contamination, groundwater, pollution, Master Entity System, environmental concerns, dump, landfill, hazardous waste, hazardous materials, cleanup, Superfund, MES, What's in My Neighborhood
Place: Minnesota

Description
Abstract
The Master Entity System (MES) is a historical data base containing location information on potential soil and ground water contamination sites in Minnesota. The site location does not include site boundaries, just a point indicating the approximate center of the site. Many, although not all, of the sites are, or have been, involved in a variety of various state and/or federal cleanup programs. This data base is updated as new sites are discovered, or when site information changes. Not all site locations have been verified resulting in a less than 100% confidence in the accuracy of this data.

Purpose
With the advent of new federal and state laws in the early1980's many properties with soil and groundwater contamination have been identified and placed on cleanup lists such as the Federal and State Superfund lists. The Pollution Control Agency (Agency) staff aggressively identified and assisted with the cleanup of sites in the state of Minnesota and as a result, it didn't take long for the number of sites to grow. While identifying these sites as environmental risks was, and is, beneficial; it also created concern surrounding the buying and selling of real property. People became reluctant to buy property for fear of buying into huge cleanup costs. At the same time, lending institutions began requiring buyers (primarily with commercial real estate) to determine environmental risks associated with a property before they would consider approving a loan for the purchase of that property. 
As a result of this the Agency started receiving requests for assistance with determining whether a property had been the site of a release or threatened release of hazardous substances, pollutants or contaminants. To respond to the growing number of requests for this information the Master Entity System was created in the 1980's. 

The data contained in this database is not of survey quality and therefore is not sufficient in and of itself to meet the requirements of determining environmental risks associated with a property, but it does provide the user with the name and locations of known and potential soil and groundwater contamination sites in a given area. It can serve as a good starting point when completing an environmental search/history of a given area.

Supplementary Information
Minnesota

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Status of the data

Time period for which the data is relevant

Publication Information
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Data storage and access information

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