Estimating Ground-Water Damages from Hazardous-Substance Releases

Abstract

At present there are 1,194 Superfund sites throughout the United States that are on the National Priorities List, because past releases of hazardous substances have contaminated natural resources and pose a human health risk. Section 107 of the Superfund Act (more formally, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act) allows federal and state government agencies, acting as natural resource trustees, to collect monetary damages from responsible parties for residual losses incurred by the public as a result of injuries to natural resources (such as ground water) caused by hazardous-substance releases. Residual losses may include losses incurred prior to and/or after the completion of remediation activities. The agencies must use the recovered natural resource damages to restore, rehabilitate, replace, or acquire the equivalent of the injured natural resources. This article focuses on estimating natural resource damages from ground-water contamination at Superfund and other sites where hazardous substances have been released. The first section briefly describes the application of the natural resource damage assessment process to ground-water contamination. The second section discusses some techniques for valuing reductions in the services provided by ground water. The third section examines the applicability and measurement of so-called nonuse values associated with ground water. The fourth section addresses natural resource damage assessment issues that may arise at actual ground-water–contamination sites. The last section summarizes the main results of this article and presents some conclusions.