By: E. Lynn Grayson
EPA has updated and revamped its Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) website to be more user friendly and flexible. EPA's ECHO website allows for users to search for facilities to assess their compliance with environmental regulations, investigate pollution sources, examine and create enforcement-related maps, or explore a specific state's performance. The legacy ECHO website is scheduled to be retired on November 27, 2013.
The database includes information on environmental inspections, violations and enforcement actions for more than 800,000 regulated facilities. According to EPA, the new interface is better organized and offers options such as collapsible and expandable data sections. The updated website allows users to search for enforcement and compliance data by city, state, or ZIP code, develop their own maps from the data or analyze enforcement trends. The key searches identified on the beta phase site are:
- search for facilities;
- analytics and trends; and
- reports and research.
The ECHO website provides helpful environmental data about certain facilities and the surrounding areas but is only as good as the information available and updated, by and large, by state environmental agencies. The ECHO website has been criticized in the past for outdated environmental information or in some cases, incorrect data.
The new site currently is available at http://www.epa-echo.gov/echo/.