Opinion ID: 775487
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Prompt and Effective Cleanup

Text: 147 While it holds that the passive soil migration  at issue in this case does not constitute disposal, the majority also concludes that disposal may include other sorts of passive migration. Majority Op. at 881. Specifically, the majority opines that the passive spilling or leaking of hazardous wastes may count as disposal. See, e.g., id. at 881, 886. The majority notes that counting passive spilling or leaking as disposal furthers CERCLA's purpose to encourage prompt and effective cleanup of hazardous wastes. Id . at 881. It also notes that were disposal read to exclude passive spilling or leaking, there would be little incentive for a landowner to examine her property for hazardous wastes and to clean up any contamination that was discovered. Id. at 881. But, of course, counting the passive migration at issue in this case as disposal also would encourage prompt cleanup, and excluding it produces the decreased incentives about which the majority frets: The majority's holding would allow a property owner who discovers hazardous waste passively migrating through the soil to escape all CERCLA liability simply by selling the property to another. 148 The majority's parsimonious reading of disposal  also leads to plainly nonsensical results. Hazardous waste that is placed directly on or in land and is actively discharging or depositing waste throughout the soil, as is the case here, is likely a more immediate and direct environmental threat than that which is placed into drums or containment pools which may or may not eventually leak. Under the majority's interpretation, however, CERCLA gives the owner of land on which hazardous waste has previously been directly placed less of an incentive to clean up the waste than it does an owner whose land contains leaking drums. The failure to count the passive migration of contaminants through soil as disposal thus frustrates CERCLA's first central purpose. 149 The majority reaches this untenable result for two reasons. First, it believes that the plain meanings of spill and leak describe the passive spread of hazardous waste but that the plain meaning of deposit and other terms in the definition of disposal that could potentially describe the passive migration at issue in this case do not. Id. at 33. Second, the majority relies on statements in CERCLA's legislative history that indicate that Congress enacted CERCLA in part out of concern for the spillage and leakage of hazardous waste from storage tanks at such places as Love Canal and the Valley of the Drums. Id. at 36, 48-50. 150 However, the majority's plain meaning analysis is patently flawed: Water, flowing through the wetlands, carried the hazardous waste and deposited it in the soil throughout the contaminated area. See supra Part I. In addition, the majority recognizes that its reliance on legislative history is a weak reed. As the majority itself notes with candor, any inquiry into CERCLA's legislative history is somewhat of a snipe hunt. Majority Op. at 885. CERCLA was an eleventh-hour compromise hastily assembled by a bipartisan leadership. Id. at 885 n.12. As such, there is precious little congressional commentary interpreting the bill that eventually became CERCLA. See id. at 885 n.13 (No committee or conference reports address the version of the legislation that ultimately became law.). Thus, while the majority finds isolated statements from congressional witnesses, senators, and representatives indicating a concern with the passive spillage or leakage of hazardous waste, this is hardly evidence that Congress meant to limit CERCLA's reach to only those forms of passive contamination that could be described as spills or leaks. 151