Bystanders wonder about the fuss over soil colors. How I can look at small piles of dirt and say, ” You’re good to go” or ” You’re screwed. Back out of the deal now.”

The auger goes into the ground like a handchurned icefishing drill and pulls up blocks of colors in eight in sections. Like tea leaves, the soil blocks tell a story of the past and future. Sometimes the soils indicates a future of easy construction plans. Sometimes the soil indicates a construction future of regulatory hurdles.  Sometimes the soil flat out says “Maybe, maybe not.”

The colors, feel, layout of the layers and composition of the soil inform whether the soil is an upland soil, a wetland soil, a human altered soil (the state was 80% farmland not that long ago) or somewhere in between. The additions of soil chemistry features such as the rust spots called redoxomorphic features tell how much water is within the soil for how long. The removal of color, commonly called white dirt, causes three characteristic soil types. The soil might be impoverished, reduced or flat out gleyed (tech speak for a certain type of wetland soil).  White dirt might also be an E layer (something more common along the glaciated Atlantic coast involving major dust settling and nothing to do with wetland soil). 

If you see someone smell the dirt, don’t jump to the conclusion that you just hired a tree hugging hippie to complete the environmental due diligence. Soil smells. Especially the soil that doesn’t get to breathe a lot because it is stuck underwater. It smells even after the water is gone. It smells like rotten eggs. Yup. A straight shot of sulfur in the sniffer.  The sulfuric smell is a warning sign to look around to see what happened to the swamp before it floods a partially built building and before the regulators send a “stop work, come talk with us” letter. Trust me, it makes for a bad morning.

If only it was only soils that could forecast future troubles. Unfortunately, there are other indicators that need to be measured before siting a project on a property that might have wetlands.