Water for Schools
Menu

Worksheet Grade 11 Social Studies & Civics

The Bexhill Works Cleanup: A Grade 11 Superfund Liability Worksheet

Students divide a fictional town's groundwater cleanup cost among four responsible parties, work out what happens when one is gone, and judge the liability rule.

Objectives

  1. Students will calculate each party's share of a cleanup cost from its share of the waste sent to a site.
  2. Students will explain how an insolvent party shifts cost onto the remaining parties under joint and several liability.
  3. Students will evaluate the intended and unintended effects of a strict, retroactive liability rule.

Vocabulary

Key words: strict liability, joint and several liability, retroactive, potentially responsible party, orphan share, settlement, brownfield, solvent

Teacher overview

When Congress wrote the federal hazardous waste cleanup law in 1980, it chose to make liability strict, retroactive, and in many cases joint and several, so that a regulator could clean a site first and sort out payment afterward. That choice moves the cost of an insolvent polluter onto whoever is left. This worksheet gives students a fictional groundwater contamination case with four responsible parties and one that no longer exists, and asks them to work the arithmetic of each settlement rule before judging the policy. The scenario is invented, but the categories match the ones an actual allocation dispute uses.

The Bexhill Works Cleanup: A Grade 11 Superfund Liability Worksheet — Grade 11 Social Studies & Civics
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Worksheet

The town of Bexhill is fictional, and every figure below was invented for this worksheet.

The Pinchbeck Machine Works operated on the north edge of Bexhill from 1946 to 1978. The plant used a solvent to clean metal parts. Waste solvent went into an unlined pit behind the building. In 1994 the town closed its Well 4 after tests found the solvent in the water. The site was added to the federal cleanup list three years later.

Federal cleanup law makes liability strict, which means a party can be held responsible without any proof of carelessness. Liability is also retroactive, so it reaches disposal that was legal at the time. And it is often joint and several, which means a regulator may collect the whole cost from any single party able to pay. That party may then sue the others for their shares.

Records show that four parties sent waste to the pit. The full cleanup is estimated at $18,000,000.

Party Status today Share of waste sent
Pinchbeck Machine Works Dissolved in 1981, no assets 45 percent
Dunhollow Plating Company Still operating 30 percent
Sallowgate Tool and Die Still operating 15 percent
Bexhill municipal garage Owned by the town 10 percent
  1. Dunhollow Plating sent 30 percent of the waste. Calculate the dollar amount that share represents out of the $18,000,000 cleanup.
  2. Sallowgate Tool and Die sent 15 percent of the waste. Calculate the dollar amount of that share.
  3. Pinchbeck Machine Works sent 45 percent of the waste and no longer exists. Calculate the dollar amount its share would have covered.
  4. Under joint and several liability, the regulator may collect from any party that can pay. Suppose Dunhollow is required to pay its own $5,400,000 share plus the whole $8,100,000 Pinchbeck share. Calculate what Dunhollow would owe.
  5. The town garage sent 10 percent of the waste, and Bexhill has 7,200 households. Calculate the cost per household if the town pays its 10 percent share of the $18,000,000 and divides it evenly among households.
  6. The three remaining parties propose a settlement that splits the $8,100,000 Pinchbeck share equally among them. Calculate the amount each of the three would add.
  7. Under that settlement, Dunhollow pays its own $5,400,000 share plus the $2,700,000 it takes on from item 6. Calculate Dunhollow's total obligation.
  8. Calculate Dunhollow's total obligation of $8,100,000 as a percent of the full $18,000,000 cleanup.
  9. The state offers a $3,000,000 grant if the parties settle within one year. Calculate the cost the parties would still divide after the grant.
  10. In two or three sentences, name one outcome the joint and several rule is meant to produce, and explain how the Bexhill case shows it.
  11. In two or three sentences, name one unintended outcome critics attribute to a strict and retroactive liability rule, and explain who bears it.

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Answer Key
  1. Answer: $5,400,000. Multiply $18,000,000 by 0.30.
  2. Answer: $2,700,000. Multiply $18,000,000 by 0.15.
  3. Answer: $8,100,000. Multiply $18,000,000 by 0.45. This amount is often called the orphan share, because the party that owes it no longer exists.
  4. Answer: $13,500,000. Add Dunhollow's own $5,400,000 to the $8,100,000 orphan share.
  5. Answer: $250 per household. Ten percent of $18,000,000 is $1,800,000, and $1,800,000 divided by 7,200 households is $250.
  6. Answer: $2,700,000 each. Divide the $8,100,000 orphan share by the three remaining parties.
  7. Answer: $8,100,000. Add Dunhollow's own $5,400,000 share to the $2,700,000 it takes on under the settlement.
  8. Answer: 45 percent. Divide $8,100,000 by $18,000,000 to get 0.45.
  9. Answer: $15,000,000. Subtract the $3,000,000 grant from the $18,000,000 estimate.
  10. Answer: The rule is meant to get sites cleaned even when a polluter is gone or insolvent, by making a solvent party pay first and sue the others later. Bexhill shows this, because the largest share belongs to a company dissolved in 1981 and the cleanup can still proceed. Accept any answer naming prompt cleanup, or the shifting of the orphan share off the public, with support from the case.
  11. Answer: Critics argue that liability reaching decades of legal disposal makes buyers avoid any property with an industrial past, which leaves contaminated land idle while development moves to open ground. The burden falls on the neighborhoods around the idle site and on the taxpayers who lose that tax base. Accept any answer naming brownfield avoidance, deterred purchase or lending, or high transaction costs, with a group named.

Differentiation

Support

Give these students a version of the fictional table with the dollar value of each share already filled in, so items 1 through 3 become a check of their reading rather than a calculation. Provide the percent-of-total setup for item 8 as a labeled fraction, and reduce items 10 and 11 to one sentence each.

Extension

Ask these students to design a fourth allocation rule for the fictional case, one that splits the orphan share in proportion to each remaining party's own share rather than equally, calculate what Dunhollow would owe under it, and write a paragraph on which of the four rules is fairest and why.

ELL supports

Pre-teach both meanings of solvent (a cleaning chemical, and able to pay debts), liability, share, and settlement using a simple diagram of four pipes feeding one pit and one bill divided four ways. Provide sentence frames for items 10 and 11: "The rule is meant to ___," and "One unintended result is ___, and it falls on ___." Allow calculations to be shown as labeled arithmetic without written explanation.

Extensions

Have students search their state environmental agency's public site list for the cleanup site nearest their school, note the year it was listed and the type of contamination reported, and write a paragraph comparing it with the fictional Bexhill case on two points of their choosing.