The New York Times is running a multi-part series, called Toxic Waters regarding the increasingly poor quality of drinking water across the US. This, despite the Clean Water Act. One of the key points in the series is that despite many thousands of documented violations of state and federal clean water regulations every year, there is hardly ever any enforcement in the way of fines. There is also the problem of enforcement itself, with very few resources available for states and the federal government to actually do inspections.
As part of this long series, the NYT has compiled data on more than 200,000 facilities that have permits to discharge pollutants and collected responses from states regarding compliance. Information about facilities contained in this database comes from two sources: the Environmental Protection Agency and the California State Water Resources Control Board. The database does not contain information submitted by the states.
A search of Clinton area permit holders is here. The list shows the City of Clinton, Ailliant Energy’s Kapp coal station, ADM, and the various petrochemical plants along Hwy 30. Although there are violatons noted on many of the facilites (most dating from 2004) very few of these facilites have been inspected since the 1980′s or early 1990′s.
