Opinion ID: 772953
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Hercules

Text: 27 Hercules challenges the district court's imposition of joint and several liability, raising various divisibility arguments that are specific to certain areas of the site, off-site areas, neighborhoods, and landfills. In some of these arguments Hercules urges us to reverse outright the entry of summary judgment against it and instruct the district court to deduct from the final judgment all response costs pertinent to the area at issue; in others it asks us to hold simply that there is a reasonable basis for divisibility and remand to the district court to apportion the harm. We review the district court's October, 1993, summary judgment decision (Vertac VII) de novo, viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the nonmoving party. Dico, 136 F.3d at 578. We will affirm only if we conclude that there are no genuine issues of material fact and that the United States is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. United States v. Findett Corp., 220 F.3d 842, 845 (8th Cir. 2000); Fed. R. Civ. P. 56. 28 We believe that the district court's analysis of Hercules's divisibility arguments reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the doctrine of divisibility. These legal errors clouded the court's view of the evidence supporting divisibility. For example, when the district court discussed divisibility in Vertac VII, it did so in summary fashion, stating merely that Hercules has not set forth any facts establishing that the harm is clearly divisible, or that Hercules' waste did not, or could not, contribute to the release and the resulting response costs at the site. Vertac VII, Dist. Ct. Order at 4 (Oct. 12, 1993). The proper standard for determining divisibility, however, is that the defendant show either distinct harms or a reasonable basis for apportioning causation for a single harm. Restatement (Second) of Torts 433A (1965). A defendant need not prove that its waste did not, or could not, contribute to any of the harm at a CERCLA site in order to establish divisibility, because it is also possible to prove divisibility of single harms based on volumetric, chronological, or other types of evidence. Bell, 3 F.3d at 895-96. A site may also be divisible if a defendant can establish that it consists of non-contiguous areas of contamination. Akzo, 881 F. Supp. at 1210; Broderick, 862 F. Supp. at 277. 29 Accordingly, we reverse the summary judgment against Hercules on the issue of liability (Vertac VII) and remand so that the district court can address the evidence supporting divisibility in light of the proper legal standards. In so holding, we reject the EPA's suggestion that evidence adduced subsequent to summary judgment-specifically, evidence presented against Uniroyal at the 1993 liability trial and evidence from the 1998 allocation trial-incontrovertibly demonstrates that Hercules cannot prevail on any of its divisibility arguments. By the same token, we deny Hercules's request that we reverse the district court's decision outright and hold that certain harms were divisible, for we conclude that the question of divisibility is one to be determined in the first instance by the district court.