Area Search

The old adage "you can't fit a square peg into a round hole" applies to environmental database reports too. For larger Site areas, it's rare that a circular radius search will properly cover your Site property. Bumping out the search radii to accommodate irregularly-shaped properties invariably includes land not associated with your Site property resulting in reports that lack precision and require additional billable hours to review. InfoMap's exclusive Area Search capabilities enable you to outline your Site boundaries exactly — simply click and connect the dots. Here's how:

  1. Diagram showing step 1 of the Area Search process
    Area searches are as easy as clicking on a map. Just zoom in and select a starting point...

  2. Diagram showing step 2 of the Area Search process
    ...then click on the map to connect-the-dots and outline your Site (that's the green line).

  3. Diagram showing step 3 of the Area Search process
    Use streets, railroads and other landmarks to guide you as you draw your Site boundary.

  4. Diagram showing step 4 of the Area Search process
    Close the polygon by clicking the "End Area" button and immediately see the size of your new Site area to the right of the map. Now you're ready to run your Area Search!

Beautiful, forested country.

Project Case Study

Find out what others have found out the hard way.

A consulting firm was contracted to perform watershed protection-area studies in Pennsylvania. One of their tasks was to locate point-source contamination areas, particularly tank data such as LUST and UST/AST records. Originally, this company performed the search on their own through Envirofacts.

The results for their 250-square-mile Area Search returned:

  • No Underground Storage Tank (UST) or Aboveground Storage Tank (AST) records
  • Only 6 Leaking UST (LUST) records
  • No Non-Geocoded records

InfoMap Technologies ran the same search with the same parameters. Our results revealed:

  • 18 UST/AST records
  • 16 LUST records
  • 19 Non-Geocoded records

The net result? Our report included 47 more records than searching solely through Envirofacts!

So why is this? Well, we have been collecting data for over fourteen years and we never remove records from our collection. However, the State is more likely to purge older records from its list, thus their overall list, though current, would not be considered historical or complete.