Environmental Due Diligence: The Information Is Everywhere!
May 2003
The Internet is an amazing source for environmental
information on air, water, and land use and abuse. Web sites can be used collectively
to secure credible and valuable information for use in property transactions
and construction projects, abd by concerned citizens, insurance companies, and
lending institutions.
by Jeff
Slivka, ARM
New Day
Underwriting Managers LLC
Living in the "information age" or electronic age, there is a tremendous
amount of information at our fingertips, quite literally. Whether you know it
or not, volumes of environmental information is offered to us through various
Internet sites, albeit, caution must be exercised when using such information.
Therefore, it's important to stick to sites considered credible. The one site
with considerable credibility has to be the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA). For those cynics, just play along with me.
Through the EPA site, you can find a variety of information with only a zip
code. In a fairly short timeframe, you could have names of federally regulated
facilities that have compliance issues or that have had agencies apply violations
to the facilities’ permits. You could have information on all the National Priority
List (NPL) sites, also known as "Superfund" sites, within a specific zip code.
I see three major benefits to these sites. One, the Internet sites are maintained
by the government (once again, to the critics, bear with me). That is a good
thing—even the links listed on the EPA site. Two, the information could be obtained
in seconds, literally. Three, and the best of all, it's free!
One of the sites that is getting some recent recognition is the ECHO site.
The EPA has established ECHO, or Enforcement and Compliance History Online,
to provide the public with compliance and enforcement information for approximately
800,000 EPA-permitted facilities nationwide. Such information includes permit,
inspection, violation, enforcement action, and penalty information about various
facilities in a specific area. This Web site allows you to search for facilities
in a targeted area for the purpose of determining whether:
- EPA or state/local governments have conducted compliance inspections,
- violations were detected, or
- enforcement actions were taken and penalties assessed in response to
environmental law violations.
The ECHO site is quite simple to use. Your zip code of interest is requested and in one
step the various facilities in that zip code that fall under the above criteria
are listed. Keep in mind the search is not all-inclusive; rather, it only includes
the following EPA data sources.
- Clean Air Act data
- Clean Water Act data
- Resource Conservation and Recovery data
- Enforcement information
The information on enforcement is pulled from multiple statutes. Enforcement
actions are listed that have been taken against the facility under one of its
permits. Useful information is provided like the referenced statute, source
ID, type of action, lead agency, and so forth. This is enough information to
enable any interested party to pose appropriate questions to the proper agency.
ECHO is just one of many however. Other useful sites are listed below (all
have been easily reprinted from the EPA Web site).
EPA
Sector Facility Indexing Project: Provides detailed compliance and release
data for 6 sectors (iron and steel, pulp mills, automobile assembly, non-ferrous
metals, petroleum refining, and federal facilities).
EPA EnviroFacts
Warehouse: Allows basic searching for facility-level information in
multiple databases.
TRI Explorer:
Provides Web-based search and analysis functions for the Toxics Release
Inventory data set.
National
Response Center Spill Search: Online "standard report" search for chemical
and oil spills reported to the National Response Center.
AIRSWeb:
View air pollutant release data.
ORE
Enforcement Alert: Is a new informational newsletter published by the
Office of Regulatory Enforcement that informs that educates the public and
regulated community of important environmental enforcement issues, recent
trends, and significant enforcement actions.
EPA Surf
Your Watershed: Office of Water Web Site lists information on watershed
quality.
Securities
and Exchange Commission (EDGAR): Use this site to find corporate disclosures
of environmental liability information, and to verify that EPA sanctions
over $100,000 have been reported to SEC.
FreeEDGAR:
Allows you to perform text searches into SEC documents to look for corporate
information. Provides more functionality than the Securities and Exchange
Commission site.
EPA's
Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators: View EPA environmental indicator
data aggregated nationally or by state, county, or zip code based on the
TRI-based risk screening model that OECA has adopted for enforcement targeting.
OECA
Data Systems and Models: Provides descriptions and links to searchable
databases and models used by OECA.
EPA
EnviroMapper: Maps several types of environmental information, including
drinking water, toxic and air releases, hazardous waste, water discharge
permits, and Superfund sites.
National
Atlas of the United States: Interactive maps with environmental, biological,
geological, and demographic layers.
OSHA
Statistics and Data: Access search tools that locate OSHA inspections
conducted within a particular establishment or within a particular industry
group.
EPA's Substance
Registry System: SRS now links to other databases on the basis of chemical
identity. Search results include Nomenclature, Synonyms in EPA, Regulations
in EPA, Data Sources, and Links.
AIRNow:The
AIRNow Web Site has four primary areas: Ozone Maps, Air Quality Forecasts,
Where I Live, and Publications.
GeoCommunicator:
This site is managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service.
It provides a series of map themes and search tools focused on land use.
FirstGov
Environmental Links: Source of links to government sponsored environmental
sites.
Office
of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Homepage
Office
of Water Total Maximum Daily Load Program: Shows 303(d) listed waters,
and impairment causes in an interactive mapping platform.
Office
of Water Drinking Water Data in SDWIS/FED: Information on water systems;
violations reported by violation type and by contaminant/rule, and GPRA
data for each year since 1993; and current Envirofacts data.
National Coastal Condition Report:The Report compiles several available
data sets from different agencies and areas of the country and summarizes
them to present a broad baseline picture of the condition of coastal waters.
Window
to My Environment: A Web-based tool that provides a wide range of federal,
state, and local information about environmental conditions and features
in an area of your choice. This application is provided by the U.S. EPA
in partnership with federal, state, and local governments and other organizations
The above Web sites can be used collectively to secure credible and valuable
information. They have various uses, and some of the major uses are identified
below.
- Property transactions. Any party to a
deal could use these resources as a check to qualify properties quickly
and cost effectively.
- Construction projects. General contractors
could utilize ECHO to also quantify risk at proposed project sites. It may
raise red flags that the general contractor could raise with the owner.
- Concerned citizen. Obviously, anyone can
input their own address or zip code to identify such sites that may be near
their neighborhood.
- Insurance companies. Environmental insurers
could utilize this information as part of their overall risk assessment
in the underwriting process. This could apply to various site policies as
well contractors pollution policies.
- Lending institutions. Banks and other
lenders could utilize this information to identify potential financial risk
associated with environmental issues.
As with anything in life, you get what you pay for. So, you must consider
the cost of this resource: nothing. Some data may not be as up to date or as
accurate as one would wish; nonetheless, spending some time on the site and
familiarizing yourself with its value is probably a good first step.
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