The Environmental Impacts of Major Hurricanes: From Sandy to Irma

This past August, Anderson Kill PC mourned the untimely passing of our colleague John Nevius, chair of the firm's environmental law group, after a long battle with cancer. An intrepid policyholder's attorney, he was also a registered professional engineer and, prior to beginning his law career, a senior project manager/hydrogeologist at the United States Environmental Protection Agency. As an attorney, he brought a wealth of technical knowledge to complex environmental insurance coverage disputes.

That expertise is reflected in his voluminous writings on environmental risks and insurance issues, and nowhere so much as in his 2012 article published in Law360, "Sandy's Environmental Impacts: Cleanup Has Just Begun," which addressed everything from major chemical discharges to exposure to asbestos and lead during cleanup. In memory of him, and to bring the benefit of his analysis to those who will be tasked with assessing and mitigating the enormous and multifaceted destruction wrought by Harvey (and threatened, at the time of writing, by Irma), I have updated his article to address the environmental hazards likely to be faced during the long, costly and sometimes doubtless dangerous recovery that will soon begin in the wake of this year's storms.

- Bob Horkovich