3d Circuit Reverses Exclusion of Expert on Environmental Contamination

The Third Circuit has reversed a trial court's exclusion of an environmental engineer's testimony about contamination from underground storage tanks at a gas station site. The trial court erred, it said, in faulting the expert for relying on environmental documents submitted by defendants, rather than conducting his own independent field testing. "We do not require an expert to base his or her opinions on independent data collection or field research," the Third Circuit panel held in a published opinion. The question, said the panel, is rather whether the expert's data are of a type reasonably relied upon by experts in the field. The appellate court said the district court also misunderstood the nature of the challenged testimony, which was offered not to determine the state of contamination on a particular date based on extrapolation from data on other dates (as the district court supposed), but rather to show that concern over the property's condition would have been reasonable at the relevant time. See Jaasma v. Shell Oil Co., No. 04-2095 (3d Cir. June 28, 2005) (Roth, Fuentes, & Becker, JJ.).