United States v. NCR Corp.

107 F. Supp. 3d 950, 45 Envtl. L. Rep. (Envtl. Law Inst.) 20098, 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 63926, 2015 WL 2350063
CourtDistrict Court, E.D. Wisconsin
DecidedMay 15, 2015
DocketCase No. 10-C-910
StatusPublished

This text of 107 F. Supp. 3d 950 (United States v. NCR Corp.) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, E.D. Wisconsin primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
United States v. NCR Corp., 107 F. Supp. 3d 950, 45 Envtl. L. Rep. (Envtl. Law Inst.) 20098, 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 63926, 2015 WL 2350063 (E.D. Wis. 2015).

Opinion

DECISION AND ORDER

WILLIAM C. GRIESBACH, Chief Judge.

Following remand of this case from the Court of Appeals,, the United States has filed a motion seeking additional findings of fact based on the record made at the [952]*952December 2012 trial conducted in this action that would reaffirm the court’s original conclusion that the harm to OU4 is not divisible and that NCR is jointly and severally hable. In the government’s view, there is enough evidence already in the record to answer two of the key questions highlighted by the Seventh Circuit in its decision remanding the case. If this court agrees with the government’s interpretation of the evidence, the matter may be resolved without the need for further proceedings. Based upon the analysis adopted by the Seventh Circuit, however, and the evidence presented at trial, I am unable to make the findings the government requests. Instead, I find that NCR has established its divisibility defense. The government’s motion will therefore be denied and NCR’s cross-motion will be granted.

I. The Trial and the Seventh Circuit’s Decision

On September 25, 2014, the Seventh Circuit affirmed parts of this court’s post-trial decision but reversed and remanded as to others. As relevant here, that decision directed this court “to reconsider NCR’s divisibility defense consistent with this opinion.” United States v. P.H. Glatfelter Co., et al., 768 F.3d 662, 682 (7th Cir.2014). As all of the parties are by now well-aware, the divisibility defense has two components. The first question asks whether the harm is theoretically capable of being divided, while the second asks whether there is a reasonable way of apportioning the damages. Id. at 682.

At trial and in earlier proceedings, the parties, their experts, and the court all viewed the evidence through the prevailing “binary” lenses that then governed the divisibility analysis. In attempting to answer the first of the two divisibility questions, the issue was not how much each PRP contributed to the concentrations, or toxicity, in OU4, but how much their discharges gave rise to the need to remediate portions of that river section. Each portion of the river either needed to be remediated, or it did not; that was why the parties and courts addressing this issue have described the question as binary. In short, the remedy imposed and its attendant costs were the touchstone of the entire analysis of harm. For example, I described the efforts of NCR’s expert, Mr. Butler, as follows:

Butler went about determining which remedial actions, if any, would need to be applied to different parts of the river, which he had conceptually divided up into polygons. For instance, if a certain polygon would have a concentration lower than 1 ppm if NCR were the only discharger, he could determine that that polygon would not need to be dredged or remediated at all. In other cases, a polygon that otherwise needed to be dredged might have been a candidate for capping (a cheaper remedy) had NCR been the only polluter. Thus, Butler’s analysis detérmines areas that would not need to be remediated at all in the NCR-only scenario, as well as areas for which different remedies could be applied.

United States v. NCR Corp., 960 F.Supp.2d 793, 809 (E.D.Wis.2013).

Based on the fuller record now before it following a bench trial, the Seventh Circuit altered the prevailing “binary” paradigm and, in essence, directed the parties and this Court to view the question of divisibility through a different set of lenses. It did so by re-defining the very harm that NCR’s defense attempts to divide. No longer is the “harm” to be viewed primarily with respect to the remedy or costs the PCBs might have triggered; instead, the harm is primarily defined with respect to [953]*953the PCBs’ actual toxicity, i.e., the “harm to human health and the environment.” Id. at 677. The Seventh Circuit found that this harm is not binary but “continuous,” because the harm increases in rough proportion to the concentration of PCBs in the water (particularly nearer the surface). Simply put, the more PCBs, the more harm. Thus, the harm is more properly defined as a release’s toxicity or danger to health and the environment, as opposed to the release’s propensity to trigger a costly remedy.1

In many ways this analysis should be much easier because it removes the somewhat cumbersome link between discharges, remediation rules and cost. If harm is essentially toxicity, we no longer need to assess whether given discharges would have given rise to the need for a specific remedy in a portion of the river. Instead, the primary question as to whether the harm is theoretically capable of being divided is now simply this: to what extent did NCR contribute to the contamination, or toxicity, in OU4? “We think the harm would be theoretically capable of apportionment if NCR could show the extent to which it contributed to PCB concentrations in OU4.” Id. at 678. As for the second question in the divisibility analysis, the Seventh Circuit concluded that if in fact NCR could show the extent to which it contributed to PCB concentrations in OU4, then “a reasonable basis for apportionment could be found in the remediation costs necessitated by each party.” Id.

II. Theoretical Divisibility

The question posed by the government’s motion is whether the record as it now stands provides enough evidence for this court to rule on the two divisibility questions. The government focuses on the Seventh Circuit’s brief discussion of several experts, who were key to its defense:

The district court thoroughly critiqued the mass-percentage estimates provided by Simon and Dr. Connolly, and we agree that those estimates likely understated NCR’s contribution to the PCBs in OU4. However, Butler also ran his analysis using the higher estimates provided by Georgia — Pacific’s expert, Dr. John Wolfe. The district court failed to explain why Dr. Wolfe’s mass-percentage estimates were unreliable. Moreover, apart from its assumption that the PCB contamination in the -Lower Fox River is binary in nature, the district court levied no criticism at Butler’s application of the mass-percentage estimates he used. There may be reasons to find that Dr. Wolfe’s mass-percentage estimates are unreliable, and there may be reasons to find that Butler’s use of those estimates was unsound, but we will not undertake such factfinding in the first instance. Therefore, we will reverse the district court’s decision on NCR’s divisibility defense and remand for further proceedings.

768 F.3d at 678.

The reason this court did not explain why the higher mass-percentage estimates referenced by Dr. Wolfe were unreliable, however, was because if the harm was binary in nature, it did not matter. In other words, if the harm at issue was the cost of remediation of those areas in which the PCB contamination was above the remedial action level of 1.0 ppm and we assume the higher estimates of NCR’s PCB contamination used by Dr. Wolfe are accurate, the required remedy would be roughly the same even if NCR was the only source. (ECF No. 729 at 2188-89.) [954]*954Given the relatively low remedial action level of 1.0 ppm, the court concluded that only if the volume of PCB discharge attributable to NCR was extremely low, far lower than the estimates used by Dr.

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Related

United States v. P.H. Glatfelter Company
768 F.3d 662 (Seventh Circuit, 2014)
United States v. NCR Corp.
960 F. Supp. 2d 793 (E.D. Wisconsin, 2013)

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Bluebook (online)
107 F. Supp. 3d 950, 45 Envtl. L. Rep. (Envtl. Law Inst.) 20098, 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 63926, 2015 WL 2350063, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-ncr-corp-wied-2015.