Pennsylvania
Don't Let Polluters Off the Hook!
Get a copy of our report, A Case For Enforcement: Improving Compliance with the Clean Water Action in Pennsylvania.
In May 2006, Clean Water Action held press conferences across the state to issue our report on the need for better enforcement of water pollution permits in Pennsylvania. Our main finding: more than 75% of the major facilities in Pennsylvania with permits to discharge into our state's waters violated their permit at least once from 2002 to 2005! That's right, less than one in four of these facilities complied with their water pollution permits all the time in those three years!
In addition, from 2002 to 2005, over 25% of the major permitted facilities were in what EPA calls "significant non-compliance." Many of these facilities were habitual violators with regular violations.
For example, from October 2001 through March 2005, the EME Homer City Power Plant was in Significant Non-Compliance every single quarter, but it had not paid a single fine in 18 months! Horsehead Corp. in Beaver County had 29 effluent violations since January 2004, 7 of them labeled Significant Non-compliance. Yet they did not pay any fines between January 2004 and June 2005.
In light of alarming examples like this, you would hope that DEP would be busy inspecting and enforcing the law. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, including inadequate funding, that is not happening. The number of inspections of facilities with discharge permits has dropped steadily in the past 6 years. The number of "Notices of Violation" sent to polluters dropped from 2003 to 2004. Fines for violators do not seem very severe either… certainly not high enough to make companies clean up!
Even more troubling, a new policy DEP plans to adopt will make it harder for the public to find out when polluters violate their permits.
DEP's website includes a database called eFACTS which lists permits for facilities and is supposed to show violations of these permits. But under a new proposed policy, DEP will only post some violations, not all violations, on this website. Only those where an official Notice of Violation is issued will be listed. Other violations where DEP doesn't issue a formal order won't be listed on the website. In addition, required sampling by companies results in reports of violations to DEP, but often this information is omitted from eFACTS.Â
That means that someone looking at the website can get totally wrong information. Even though no violations are listed, a company could still have multiple violations in their record.
What You Can Do: Write to DEP and urge them to make sure that all violations of water pollution laws are publicly posted on their eFACTS website and readily available to the public. Tell them that the public has a right to know when companies are breaking the law and polluting our waterways.
Send your letter to:DEP Secretary Kathleen McGinty
or kmcginty@state.pa.us
PO Box 2063
Harrisburg, PA 17105-2063
Include your name & address, ask for a reply.
