Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stood up the Enforcement & Compliance History Online (ECHO) website to provide details on clean water violations, with updated data and a mapping tool that allows the public to compare water quality trends for the past two years. The interactive map includes detailed information for each state, including those facilities that are violating the Clean Water Act and the actions that are being undertaken to enforce the law and protect public health.
The site contains a rich level of detail about the type of violation, the monitoring that has taken place, and the national average of violations that have taken place. Several things struck me while viewing the maps and data, including the scale of the effort involved, the acceptability of goal of more than 50% of major violators be inspected each year, the collaboration with state enforcement, and the dollar totals of penalties.
This level of transparency is critically important, with the simplified map and chart view lending a much clearer understanding of local and regional impacts of these violations that you simply don’t get looking at the detailed accounting of individual violations.
