Developing publicly accessible data analytic tools to understand EPA’s COVID policy on environmental enforcement

Abstract:

As communities living near polluting facilities quarantine, environmental health hazards compound the risk of a COVID case becoming severe. Despite this, in late March 2020, the Trump administration issued an executive order temporarily relaxing EPA reporting and enforcement requirements, continuing the ongoing dismantlement of the EPA. We used data from the EPA’s Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) database to chart the impact the COVID-19 policy has had on industry compliance and EPA oversight. We do this by analysing the trends of EPA investigations, enforcement, and recorded industry violations under the Clean Water Act (CWA) and Clean Air Act (CAA).

Given that ECHO data can be difficult for the general public to access and analyze, we store the raw data on a database at Stonybrook University and retrieve it using a Jupyter Notebook, which is a collaborative, public platform for data analysis primarily programmed in Python.

As of late July 2020, we found that, under the CAA, approximately 40% fewer stack tests were conducted in March and April 2020 compared to March and April 2019. Under the CWA, more than 200,000 water pollution reports from over 10,000 facilities were missing or reported late, and reported violations of the CWA were down by approximately 20%. Facilities that did continue to self-report tended to be consistent violators over the last 12 quarters of reporting. This trend demonstrates that decreases in EPA oversight is not unique to the COVID policy. Rather, COVID has exacerbated the trend of precipitous drops in enforcement over the last decade.

We are continuing this method of collaborative data analysis in a project called “Environmental Enforcement Watch” (EEW) with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) to create a toolkit that will help environmental justice communities answer similar questions about environmental enforcement as it impacts their lives on a local scale, especially during the COVID pandemic. In sharing this toolkit, EEW seeks to center the stories of frontline communities experiencing declining environmental enforcement through storytelling workshops that coincide with ECHO data analysis.