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Natural Resource Damage Assessment: Methods and Cases

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Table 1.13 Injured <strong>Resource</strong>s<br />

Type of resource injured Number of cases<br />

Groundwater 32<br />

Surface water 51<br />

Wetl<strong>and</strong> 42<br />

Fish 36<br />

Wildlife 32<br />

Recreation <strong>and</strong>/or cultural 23<br />

Air <strong>and</strong>/or other resources 26<br />

Any resources reported a 83<br />

a The right-h<strong>and</strong> column sums to much more than 83 because only 25 cases involved injury to a single resource.<br />

The trustees reported that an NRDA had been performed on the entire injury for only 33 of<br />

the 88 cases in our sample. Injury assessments were performed for the 32 cases submitted by<br />

New Jersey, but the agency did not consider those assessments to have been NRDAs. Tables<br />

1.14 through 1.17 give information about the 33 assessments. These tables apply only to those<br />

cases that were reported to have been the subject of an NRDA, <strong>and</strong> information for these tables<br />

was not provided for even all of those cases.<br />

Trustee agencies reported hiring a consultant to assistant with the damage assessment<br />

process for 10 of the 33 cases for which they gave NRDA information. This may contribute to<br />

the fact (seen in Table 1.14) that the cost to trustees of conducting an NRDA varies<br />

tremendously. While most cases cost less than $10,000 to assess, several assessments in the data<br />

bear price tags in the millions; though the median assessment cost is only $30,000, the average is<br />

$643,000. Estimated damages (Table 1.15) were similarly quite diverse. While some estimates<br />

are lower than $10,000, there are enough estimates in excess of 10 million to pull the mean<br />

damage estimate up to 40 million <strong>and</strong> the median to over one million.<br />

Trustees were asked which of a range of assessment methods were used by their staff, the<br />

staff of other trustees, <strong>and</strong> any consultants in the process of estimating the damages associated<br />

with the case at h<strong>and</strong>. Note that the methods listed in Tables 1.16 <strong>and</strong> 1.17 are defined <strong>and</strong><br />

described in the Appendix to Chapter 1. The single most commonly-used method was habitat<br />

equivalency analysis (HEA), while a few methods (factor-income analysis, hedonic analysis,<br />

Department of Interior (DOI) Type A models, NOAA compensation formulas, <strong>and</strong> conjoint<br />

analysis/contingent ranking) were not reported to have been used for any of the cases in our<br />

sample. Many cases were reported to have been assessed using a tool of the trustee’s own design<br />

or some unspecified method that was not among those we listed. This feature of the data captures<br />

everything from New Jersey’s method for assessing groundwater damage (Ando <strong>and</strong> Khanna,<br />

2004) to back-of-the-envelope analysis based on applied professional judgment.<br />

10

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