The Environmental Protection Agency inspected the vast majority of hazardous waste sites in the United States during 2014, but fell short of their statutory requirement of inspecting all of them, according to an inspector general report released Friday.
The report showed the EPA inspected 91 percent of a sample of the country’s hazardous waste treatment, storage and disposal facilities in 2014. However, it is required by law to inspect 100 percent of those facilities.
“Although overall inspection rates are high, the EPA did not fully meet the legal requirement for inspecting 100 percent of operating (facilities) for the fiscal year ending 2014,” the report stated. “Inspections for facilities such as state and local TSDFs are just over 50 percent.”
There are three types of hazardous waste treatment, storage and disposal facilities: private, federal and state, and local. EPA inspectors are required to visit federal and state-owned sites every year and private sites every other year.
The inspector general chose a sample of 718 facilities around the country, which include landfills and other waste disposal sites. Of the 111 federal sites chosen, the EPA inspected 85 percent of them, and of the 583 private sites chosen, the EPA inspected 94 percent.
However, the EPA inspected just 54 percent of the 24 state-owned facilities in the sample.
According to the review, the EPA’s Office of Compliance and Enforcement Assurance cited budget constraints as its reasoning for why it didn’t inspect all the sites.
“The EPA is not meeting the statutory requirement for frequency of inspections, because the office receives a budget for ‘compliance monitoring,'” the report stated, “but the budgeted monies are used to fund inspections and other activities that help support the efficiency and effectiveness of the compliance and enforcement program as a whole.”
According to the report, there are about 60,000 hazardous waste sites around the country and 80 percent of the population lives within three miles of a site.
The fact that the EPA did not fulfill their legal requirements could put public health at risk, the report stated.
“Full monitoring for noncompliance and potential risk to human health and the environment is not occurring based on what law requires,” the report stated. “The EPA has not taken steps to manage this challenge or developed any solutions or contingency plans.”
In response, the EPA disagreed with the report’s assessment, but did not provide any alternatives to completely fulfilling its legal duties. According to the report, the EPA seems to think it was justified in its decision-making because of the limited resources it has.
“The agency made a strategic decision on how to use its limited resources to best protect human health and the environment. In a meeting to discuss its comments, EPA management stated that it strives to meet the inspection requirement,” the report stated. “However, the EPA did not provide any evidence that it uses a risk-based decision-making process. The agency also did not provide any policies, methodology or prioritization procedures that it uses to make risk-based inspection decisions.”
