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Superfund and compensation needed

I want to offer some ideas for local, county and state governments to consider regarding the future of our river and the lasting impact of the toxic spill on our community and region.

First, EPA should not be permitted to leave the river as is. Sediments will continue to be laden with heavy metals, to be stirred up anew whenever there is intense runoff, facilitating their entry into the food and water chain. Future acidic-water events will cause “solubility spikes” that will temporarily raise the concentration of heavy metal salts and other undesirable dissolved chemicals in river water itself.

There is precedent for declaring a major river a Superfund site and remediating it accordingly. Perhaps the largest is the Hudson River in New York state, where 200 river-miles have been declared a Superfund site, and a decades-long project is underway to remove PCBs and other contaminants deposited primarily by GE in the mid-20th century. See for example www.epa.gov/hudson/cleanup.html.

Remediating the Animas would pose significant technical problems, but the volume of material is likely much smaller than the Hudson River project. In addition, it is possible that more benign state-of-the-art bioremediation technology may be brought to bear to assist or substitute for brute force methods.

Second, I want to raise the issue of compensation to the region for the broad long-term economic damage derived from the insult to nature from the spill. This involves placing a market value on something for which there is no actual market: our natural environment.

The method used in these circumstances is “contingent valuation.” It is a survey-based method that seeks to determine what people would be willing to pay to have avoided environmental damage. It was used extensively in the Exxon Valdez case and would have been used in the BP Gulf spill case had a settlement not been negotiated. The New York Times ran an unrelated piece on the method just a few days after the Animas discharge.

While we may not have standing in federal court to pursue such compensation, a worthy approach to Congress may produce justified results.

Roger W. Cohen

Durango



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