Emergency Planning & Community Right-to-Know

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

IN REPONSE TO THE QUERY ON EPCRA ...

Congress enacted the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act in
1986. Title III of that legislation, otherwise known as th Emergency
Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) established new
requirements for both local emergency planning and the disclosure of
toxic releases. Federal agencies were exempt from those requirements,
but EPA strongly encouraged voluntary compliance, particularly with the
emergency planning provisions of the law. In general, Defense components
soon met the conceptual objectives of the Emergency Planning portion of
the legislation and voluntarily cooperated with Local Emergency Planning
Committees.

Government-Owned Contractor Operated (GOCO) facilities, however, were
required by law to comply with the Right-to-Know provisions of the law.
That is, the contractors that operated Army Ammunition Plants, Air Force
Plants, and Navy Reserve Plants were required to submitted annual
reports to the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), the often cited national
data base on toxic emissions, discharges, etc. Though it appears that
not all GOCOs met their obligations, in 1993 52 separate Defense and
Energy Department facilities filed TRI reports. In February, 1996, EPA's
Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance issued a 25-page summary,
"TRI Reporting at Government-Owned Contractor Operated Federal
Facilities (GOCO's): 1990-1993" (EPA 300-R-96-003).

In August, 1993, President Clinton signed Executive Order 12856,
requiring federal facilities meeting TRI chemical thresholds - minimum
amounts of release triggering the filing of reports - to begin
collecting TRI data in 1994. The Defense Department not only began
submitting reports, it designed a pollution prevention strategy around
the analysis of its TRI data.

However, as I reported in May, toxic releases from munitions activity,
such as open burning and open detonation, have not been reported.
Beginning the year 2000, the armed services will begin reporting such
releases from waste management activities, but not from testing or
training. This is a step forward, but it is not clear yet how such
releases will be calculated. Past military studies of open burning and
open detonation have minimized the quantity of such releases.

Facilities that report TRI data for any calendar year have until July 1
of the following year to submit their reports. Normally it takes US EPA
almost a year to collect, check, and analyze that data on a national
basis. Thus, the data just relesed by EPA covers calendar 1996.
Sometimes it is possible to get data much sooner either by going to the
state agency responsible for TRI within the state or directly to the
filing entity, such as the Department of Defense.

Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 222B View St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/968-1126
lsiegel@cpeo.org