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This website is authored by Lester Levy, Esq.
a founding member of JAMS.

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You are here: Home / Archives for New Jersey pollution

Mediation Can Accelerate Cleanup

March 11, 2016 by Lester Levy Leave a Comment

Mediation Can Accelerate Cleanup

A recent exposé broadcast on New Jersey public television revealed there may be as many 100,000 unaddressed and leaking underground storage tanks in New Jersey. Many of the tanks contain hazardous materials including petroleum products such as heating oil and gasoline, PCE-used by dry cleaners over many years to clean our clothes-and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), such as “degreasers,” used in many manufacturing businesses. If not contained, these chemicals, which are potentially hazardous to human health and the environment, can threaten the groundwater we drink and use to irrigate our crops.

Many of these tanks have remained in place for decades-either forgotten, because historical users have moved on, or ignored because our current legal and administrative system lacks the resources to investigate and require necessary remedial action at all sites. Cases involving multiple parties and adjoining properties are at the mercy of the judicial and administrative procedural inefficiencies identified above and the “business-as-usual” attitude of the legal professionals handling them. So resolution-and cleanup-are delayed while the contamination at issue continues to migrate or volatize, thereby risking harm to people and the environment.

Mediation provides a way to cut through this backlog. Environmental mediation as an alternative or adjunct to traditional federal or state court litigation has proven to be enormously successful. Unlike immutable judicial rules, mediation procedures and outcomes are not limited to any one statutory scheme-or to any pre-determined set of remedies. Mediation has fewer technical and tactical delays than traditional litigation because its progress is driven entirely by the parties themselves. The federal Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Justice, and their counterpart state environmental agencies, attorneys general and environmental project managers, can join in the mediated discussions even if they are not formally parties to the case. In my experience, the sooner the agencies are involved, the sooner the courts require mediation of cases that will benefit from its use, the faster the case can be resolved to the satisfaction of the parties and the agencies. Streamlining the dispute resolution process can provide a correspondingly huge savings of time and money. And the money that is spent “in process” is focused on resolution and cleanup. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Mediation vs. Litigation Tagged With: ADR, alternative dispute resolution, environmental disputes, environmental mediation, mediation vs. litigation, New Jersey pollution, water contamintation

A Crisis in New Jersey with Underground Storage Tanks

December 16, 2015 by Lester Levy 1 Comment

underground storage tanksNew Jersey Public Television (NJTV) recently completed a broadcast of a three-part expose on the dangers and difficulties stemming from as many as 100,000 underground storage tanks that remain in the ground throughout the state.  In very stark terms the NJTV report warns that some of the sites are “nightmares” and “environmental ticking time bombs”, posing an immediate threat of contamination from seepage into ground water and basements in heavily populated areas.

These old storage tanks, both above and underground, are from homes, gas stations and dry cleaning sites – closed or currently in operation – where the chemicals have leaked over time.  The chemicals include fuel, PCP (dry cleaning fluid) or VOCs like degreasers and other chemicals used in automotive or other manufacturing sites.  As storage tanks are prone to corrosion, some of the chemicals have leaked into the soils and then leached into the groundwater.  This is true of almost every tank that was built or installed more than ten to fifteen years ago, when the technology was changed to build tanks with several layers of protection.  Often neighboring businesses’ tanks release chemicals into the soil which then leaches into the groundwater and combine to form “plumes” of contamination in the ground water, which flow with the groundwater in underground channels to other properties.  One of the main concerns is that these plumes of contamination can reach areas where drinking water wells draw water from the contaminated groundwater or where the chemicals in the plume “off gas” as vapor upwards through the soil into buildings and homes.  These scenarios present very real risks to human health and welfare.

All expletives aside, the problems and risks stemming from these buried and abandoned underground storage tanks perfectly illustrate the reason we need a new approach to solve long-standing environmental cleanup problems.  As the NJTV reporters observed, the NJ Department of Environmental Protection is simply overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem.  Given budget limitations and the protracted legal process involved when regulators move to compel cleanup, the NJ DEP has essentially been performing radical triage, focusing its resources on the situations needing immediate attention, which likely will result in the vast majority of these storage tanks remaining in the ground – and the contamination remaining in the groundwater — for many years to come. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Mediation vs. Litigation Tagged With: contamination, environmental mediation, New Jersey pollution, NJTV, waste storage tanks

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About Me

lester-levy

I strongly believe in the value of mediation – said another way, environmental mediation really works. I would go even further: I believe that environmental disputes are perfectly suited to the mediation process – perhaps more so than any other area of legal practice. I have formed these views after mediating environmental cases for more than 20 years, throughout the United States, and having worked with thousands of lawyers, companies, insurance carriers, regulatory agencies and courts. My … Read more

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