Planning and executing a lab move is a daunting and complicated process. Our in-house expert, Ian Lanza will be presenting a webinar on strategies for managing a lab move with a focus on time and cost-effectiveness. Here are his answers to your top three burning questions.
How long should a lab move take?
That’s a good question. That’s hard to answer. It really depends on logistics and the quantity of stuff being moved. For example, I just completed a move this week where we were actually on the site three days to do the move. We were only on site three or four hours because they needed to move in chunks. So we needed to get everything out in one space on day one so that they can move equipment. So that we could move other stuff on day two and that we could move other things on day three.
You know as part of a very large relocation this summer, it literally took us four months to move the entire facility. So it really depends on the situation and the amount of stuff that you have to move.
What permits do you need prior to a lab move?
To actually do the chemical move, you won’t need any permit. You’ll need vendors that are permitted to transport chemicals on BOT roads. So the company driver will have all the permits to do that. And then depending on exactly what you have, what type of chemicals or hazardous materials you’re using, will determine the types of permits that you need.
We’ll send the presentation outs here but one of the last slides provided a list. There were about ten different permits on there. It wasn’t comprehensive at all but those are the core ones. You know one thing I would say because I know we have people joining from all different geographies, look at what the federal regulations are, state regulations are and then your town or city regulations. So I’m based up here on Summerville in Cambridge Massachusetts. There are a lot of Cambridge regulations that require additional permits and so on that you know in a different geography may not be necessary.
If a landlord decides a lab is not clean enough after the tenant has done decontamination what’s the best course of action?
Right that’s a really good question. It goes to what I was talking about as far as really managing the big picture of liability. So I found that most times leases are specifically vague and then other times landlords don’t want to tell you exactly what they’re expectations are.
If that’s the case, I’m strongly recommending adhering to the ANSI guidelines of how to decontaminate a research lab or manufacturing space. Because then that is a third party certified method on how to do it. If you have a service contractor or somebody that is adhering to that standard and you provide that closure document at the end.
I’ve listed some of the things. These are 100 pages of documenting literally every last step to get out of that facility. If you provide that to them, it’s very hard for them to tell you it’s not clean. You know the only case they may do that is if they have a third party that has also done sampling and their sample results are different from yours. Then there could be some contention there. But if you’re adhering to that ANSI standard, you’re really covering a lot of your liability that way.
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