ENVIRONMENT : County Private Eyes Nose Around to Find Whodunit in Toxic Waste Cases

A group of Orange County sleuths-for-hire has found a niche that could become fertile ground for ambitious private investigators: ferreting out the culprits responsible for toxic waste problems.

While the public might not care about the source of a toxic dump as long as it is cleaned up, the question of how the waste problem originated is a vital one when businesses and their insurance carriers allocate the cleanup costs.

That’s where Murphy & Maconachy, a Santa Ana-based firm of private investigators, comes into the picture. Headed by three former FBI agents, the company has traditionally focused on such corporate crimes as fraud and employee theft. But in recent years it has become one of the few firms in the nation to specialize in highly complex environmental investigations.

“With so many dollars at risk, people on all sides are taking notice,” said Drew Maconachy. He said about 30% of the company’s work now involves environmental cases, and added that it is the fastest-growing segment of the business.

Such investigations can be critical for companies large and small because toxic waste laws require people responsible for waste to pay for the cleanup. And the question of exactly how the pollution occurred can be critical because it determines whether or not the firm’s insurance carrier is responsible for the cleanup costs.

Murphy and Maconachy work primarily for the insurance industry, investigating the history of waste problems for which a company wants its insurer to pay. While the details of every situation are different, in general the insurance carrier is responsible if the waste resulted from an accident, but not if it was a byproduct of routine company practices.

“We’re hired to develop the facts,” Maconachy said. “Maybe there were accidents, but many times there were not.”

The techniques used by the toxic sleuths include extensive document searches and interviews with former employees to establish what the firm’s business practices were at the time that the waste was dumped.