Administration Changes, EPA Remains the Same

The EPA may be under new leadership, but the ideals remain the same.

It’s perhaps easy to blame the problems at the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies charged with protecting the environment and public health, on the ideals of past presidential administrations.

Take the problems we mentioned last week, for instance. The EPA’s study of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” a practice used by drilling companies to bring natural gas to the surface, which involved no field testing or water testing. The EPA, in fact, didn’t even know what chemicals industry used in fracking, so if it had tested, it wouldn’t even know what to look for. This despite 15 years of complaints by Wyoming residents about water problems.

With the Bush administration’s well-established ties to the energy industry, it’s only natural to look at what happened in Wyoming, and the problems in the EPA, as a product of a bygone era in U.S. politics. But, as if to underscore how wrong that view is, on August 27 the U.S. EPA released an audit of New Jersey’s state EPA. Among the audit’s findings:

None of the Site Remediation Program’s bureaus interviewed do any project
assessment and/or process improvement beyond data validation, (i.e. no field audits, no
split samples, no internal assessments, etc). The EPA assessment team was told that
Responsible Party contractors and/or NJDEP contractors are “certified professionals and
taken at their word.”

So, New Jersey EPA’s Site Remediation Program, the body in charge of contaminated sites, was skipping field audits and other obvious methods for determining whether sites were cleaned. This is pretty much exactly what happened in Wyoming. At the same time, they were taking the people responsible for contamination (the “Responsible Parties”) at their word as to whether or not sites were clean. Worse, according to the report, the U.S. EPA had first warned New Jersey about these problems in 2006, yet nothing was done. All of this occurred under Lisa Jackson, former head of the New Jersey EPA, and President Obama’s pick to head the entire U.S. EPA.

So what does this mean to people in Wyoming, where their water may have been poisoned by fracking, or places like Libby, Montana; Waukegan, Illinois; or El Dorado, California that have been air poisoned by tremolite asbestos? If nothing else, it means that a change in administration isn’t the beginning or end of problems in the EPA. If we really want this to be an agency that fights for public health, the public is going to have to be the watch dog.

Paul Peters