Superfund

Under the law, parties responsible for the release of hazardous substances are liable for any resulting injury to natural resources, such as wildlife and groundwater. Federal agencies, state governments, and tribal authorities have been designated natural resource trustees and are authorized to make claims against responsible parties for natural resource damages. As of April 1995, relatively few claims had been settled and their amount was small compared with the cost of cleaning up sites, but some recent claims have been quite sizable. These large claims have heightened concern over the potential for future claims. This report (1) provides information on the potential for future federal natural resource damage claims, (2) determines total funds that federal agencies have collected from natural resource damage settlements and how these funds have been used, and (3) describes the procedures that federal agencies use to set the amount of damage claims.

GAO found that: (1) the Department of the Interior and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimate that 60 sites may eventually have claims for damages to natural resources that will equal or exceed $5 million and that up to 20 of these sites may have claims exceeding $50 million; (2) of the $83.8 million owed to the federal government for the five largest natural resource damage settlements, only about 40 percent has been collected, and 11 percent of these funds has been spent; (3) the collected money has been used to reimburse trustees for completed damage assessments and to pay for natural resource restoration plans; (4) while CERCLA did not require standards or methods to determine damages, it directed Interior to develop consistent procedures that trustees should consider when assessing damages to natural resources; (5) trustees rarely use either of the procedures, since one is limited in scope and the other is costly and time-consuming; and (6) the 95 settlements reached as of April 1995 used abbreviated procedures that use readily available site-specific information and scientific literature to quantify damages.