Natural Resource Damage Assessments in Urbanized
and Changing Habitats
– Berry’s Creek, New Jersey
Mark S. Laska (1), Richard W. Galloway (2), Daniel T. Guest (3), and Ian Lipsky (1)
(1) Great Eastern Ecology, Inc., 2231 Broadway, New York, NY 10024, 212 579-6800 212 496-4034, mlaska@geeinc.net; www.greateasternecology.com
(2) Honeywell International, Morristown NJ. www.honeywell.com
(3) MACTEC Engineering and Consulting, Inc., 242 Princeton Avenue Hamilton NJ 08619 www.mactec.com
Natural Resource Damage (NRD) penalties follow from Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) or Oil Pollution Act (OPA) actions where a release into the environment has resulted in a loss of ecological services. Habitat Equivalency Analysis (HEA) is a model that is used to estimate the extent to which the potentially responsible parties (PRPs) are required to reimburse the public for the injury, payable in the form of cash or equivalent habitat enhancements on site or elsewhere. The HEA analysis is based on the presumption that before the release a baseline level of habitat services existed. However, complex urban industrial areas have experienced generations of habitat service losses resulting from development as well as releases. CERCLA is specific that a PRP inherits the environmental degradation of previous property owners, but where is that baseline to be drawn with regards to habitat? For instance, the habitat of the New Jersey Meadowlands has changed dramatically in the last 150 years. The remaining habitat in Berry’s Creek, the location for a recent CERCLA action, was formerly freshwater Atlantic white cedar forest, and then it became brackish Spartina alterniflora marsh, and is now primarily Phragmites-dominated marsh. Wetlands have been drained and filled for navigational and developmental uses diminishing habitat value. The Passaic River ecosystem has experienced similar longterm habitat perturbations as in the Meadowlands. We examine the difficulties and complexities in establishing a HEA protocol when baseline habitat values are changing over time and are due to multiple influences, releases and non-release events.