About 60 percent of the facilities in the Upper Susquehanna River Watershed with pollutant discharge permits under the Clean Water Act have not been inspected within the past five years. The river, shown here at Binghamton, provides drinking water for about 4.1 million people in New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland. / File photo
• Federal rules say sites with Clean Water Act permits should be inspected every five years. In New York, the state Department of Environmental Conservation has not visited more than 3,000 such sites in the last five years.
• Many facilities in the Southern Tier that are on or near the headwaters of major watersheds that provide drinking water to much of the Mid-Atlantic region have not been inspected.
• States like New York face no consequences for failing to meet federal inspection frequency goals.
A January chemical spill that left 300,000 West Virginia residents without drinking water cast a harsh light on that state’s environmental regulators, who had not visited the site of the spill since 2001. · But a review of federal environmental inspection data shows West Virginia is not alone. · In New York — the source of rivers that provide water to much of the Mid-Atlantic region — polluters large and small avoid the eyes of regulators as well.
Nearly 61 percent of the 6,300 facilities in New York with pollutant discharge permits under the Clean Water Act have not been inspected within the past five years, an analysis of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data for this report found.
Other findings in the paper's analysis include:
All facilities with Clean Water Act permits — from municipal wastewater plants to major industrial factories — are supposed to be inspected at least once every five years under “inspection frequency goals” established by the EPA in 2007. Sites with “major” permits are to be inspected once every two years.
Yet the EPA’s goals do not have the force of law, making way for a national patchwork of inspection policies. In Indiana, where pollution review rules apparently are observed, 91 percent of all facilities have been inspected in the last five years. In West Virginia, only 25 percent have been inspected.
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation spokesman Peter Constantakes said the agency inspects facilities based on “an annual inspection work plan that considers the size and potential water quality impact of permitted facilities.”
Among the uninspected facilities in New York are abandoned power plants and other former industrial sites dotting a region of the Southern Tier and central New York that also includes the headwaters of water systems serving major East Coast population centers.
Parts of Delaware and Broome counties contain the headwaters of the Delaware River watershed, which provides drinking water for 15 million people. The Susquehanna River, which provides water to more than 4 million people, stems from the Chemung and Upper Susquehanna sub-basins, which include Broome, Chemung, Steuben, Tompkins and Tioga counties.
When facilities go without inspections, it’s not just the risk of a catastrophic disaster that’s at stake, said Maya Van Rossum, Delaware Riverkeeper for the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, a nonprofit that acts as an advocate for the waterway.
“The inspection rates are so low that there is a huge proportion of violations that are going unaccounted for — which means ongoing harm,” she said.
On Jan. 9, a leak was discovered at a chemical bulk storage facility operated by Freedom Industries, 1½ miles upstream from West Virginia’s largest drinking water supply.
The release of about 7,500 gallons of a little-known substance called methylcyclohexanemethanol, or MCHM, left more than 300,000 people in a nine-county area without potable water.
Freedom Industries held a pollutant discharge permit under the Clean Water Act, yet the site had not been inspected since 2001.
Evan Hansen, president of Morgantown, W.Va.-based consulting firm Downstream Strategies, was called to testify before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works in March after co-authoring a report on the lessons learned from the Elk River spill.
“There’s important information that’s gathered through on-site inspections that you can’t get any other way,” he said in an interview for this report.
Freedom Industries did not have a groundwater protection plan, which was required by the permit, and had only a draft storm water pollution prevention plan. “The first question that the inspector would have asked if they arrived on that site was to see a copy of those two documents and notice that they were missing,” Hansen said.
Inspectors, if they walked the facility, would have “immediately noticed that the secondary containment was inadequate, and they might also have noticed that the tank itself was not structurally sound,” he said. “A visual inspection would have identified that.”
Nationwide, 110,761 of 180,848 facilities — about six out of 10 — with Clean Water Act permits have gone at least five years without an inspection.
The analysis for this report also found that in the Upper Susquehanna River Watershed — which includes the headwaters of the Susquehanna in Otsego, Chenango, Broome, Cortland, Tompkins and Tioga counties — 64 of the 106 have not been inspected.
The Susquehanna River watershed is the drinking water source for about 4.1 million people in New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Among 328 “major” facilities in New York, 73 have not been inspected within the past two years — the guideline set by the EPA.
Those major facilities not inspected since at least 2012 include the former AES Hickling coal-fired power plant, on the banks of the Chemung River near the Chemung-Steuben county line.
Although major sites are expected to be inspected at least once every two years, there are no consequences for states when that doesn’t happen.
Constantakes, the state DEC spokesman, said New York’s annual inspection regimen is reviewed and approved by the EPA. “Under this plan, every major facility will be inspected every two years,” he said.
Despite the state’s plan, federal data show many of New York’s major facilities have gone several years without inspections.
National weaknesses in the regularity of inspections have been noted in internal EPA reports and external reviews of the agency for at least a decade.
In a July 2009 memo, then-EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said regulators were falling short of expectations for the effectiveness of clean water enforcement programs.
“Data available to EPA shows that, in many parts of the country, the level of significant non-compliance with permitting requirements is unacceptably high, and the level of enforcement activity is unacceptably low,” Jackson said.
Part of the problem, according to the reports, is the lack of uniform expectations between states, whose respective environmental agencies perform almost all of the physical site inspections.
A 2010 report by EPA’s inspector general — the agency’s internal watchdog branch — rated the sufficiency of each state’s contracts, or “memoranda of agreement” with the EPA. New York’s 1975 contract with EPA was rated as the third-most inadequate behind those of Kansas and Nebraska.
Most recently, a 2011 report by the EPA’s Office of Inspector General found the agency “does not administer a consistent national enforcement program.”
“As a result, EPA’s enforcement program cannot assure equal and sufficient protection of human health and the environment to all U.S. citizens or consistent enforcement of regulated entities,” the report said.
Van Rossum, of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, said consistent inspections are important to ensuring fairness between permit-holding businesses and industries by making sure violators are detected.
They are also key to the process of detecting bad actors, which allows regulators to make decisions about when to renew a permit.
“One aspect of the failure to inspect is that you’re then allowing, unchecked, these industrial operations to continue to be permitted and to continue to go on,” she said. “... You’re allowing those who do violate to get off the hook.”
During the March 16 Senate hearing provoked by the West Virginia spill, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said changes had to be made to the national inspection regimen.
She listed the Freedom Industries spill among a string of recent chemical-related disasters, including the 2013 explosion of a fertilizer storage and distribution facility that killed 15 people in West, Texas.
“The ever-growing list of catastrophic failures must be a wake-up call for all of us — including the EPA, which does have existing authorities they ought to be using,” Boxer said.
Rafael Moure-Eraso, chairman of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, said at the hearing that environmental regulators have the science and engineering expertise needed to avert future disasters.
“My only concern,” he said, “is that there might be not enough ... additional resources for enough inspectors to look at these issues.”