Inspector General: EPA's toxic chemical reports for south Louisiana inaccurate over 5-year period

April 13-- Apr. 13--The Environmental Protection Agency spread false information about toxic chemicals over the course of five years, the agency's Office of the Inspector General announced this week.

In a public letter, the OIG "decided to issue an immediate management alert informing the agency of our discovery that its (Toxic Release Inventory) data ... are inaccurate," the letter states.

The TRI tracks industrial chemical releases and attempts to curb pollution. Government agencies, companies, academics and the public use its data to inform decisions, the OIG says.

The TRI monitors substances known to cause cancer or otherwise harm human life and the environment. The inventory tracks many petrochemical sites in Louisiana, particularly in the corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. In fact, the Pelican State has 370 TRI facilities, and Louisiana ranks fourth out of 56 states and territories for releases per square mile, according to the EPA website.

Between 2012 and 2017, the EPA did not provide accurate information, the letter states. The OIG believes facilities were correctly reporting data, but the EPA failed to account for material that was sent to publicly owned treatment works, OIG spokesman Jeffrey Lagda wrote in an email to The Advocate.

Brian Snyder, an assistant professor in the LSU Department of Environmental Sciences, explained what that means.

Most monitored chemicals generated at industrial facilities are so toxic they must be injected into the ground or taken to a specialty waste site. Some less dangerous chemicals can be released into the local water system to be cleaned at the municipal wastewater treatment plant. Those are the substances that disappeared from the records, said Snyder, who studies energy systems at LSU's College of the Coast and the Environment.

He couldn't find any missing chemicals from Denka, the LaPlace chemical plant that's been the subject of lawsuits and government-mandated pollution reduction. But Snyder was able to instantly find a compressor factory in Natchitoches that generated 460 pounds of manganese compounds that just vanished from the books.

"The whole thing is kind of odd. ... They seem to have made some boneheaded error," he said.

Scholars like Snyder who have used TRI data in their works are waiting to see the fallout of the mistake.

In a terse email to The Advocate, the EPA's press office noted they corrected the problem within three business days of it being brought to their attention and said the "glitches" did not impact their recently-released 2017 National Analysis. The agency has two more weeks to file an official response to the OIG letter, and the inspector's office expects to issue a report in late spring that will look at how the problem was able to persist for five years, said Lagda, the OIG spokesman.

"The TRI is the most important tool guaranteeing Americans the right to know about toxic chemical pollution in their own backyards," Environmental Working Group President Ken Cook wrote in a statement.

The nonprofit noted that it's rare for the OIG to issue an emergency alert, but since the TRI monitors toxic chemicals and hazardous substances, it is important to make sure it is accurate.

"EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler should take the inspector general's warning seriously and move immediately to restore the integrity of the TRI," Cook wrote.

___

(c)2019 The Advocate, Baton Rouge, La.

Visit The Advocate, Baton Rouge, La. at www.theadvocate.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.