EPA Makes Secret ‘Watch List’ Public

Photo courtesy of Suzie Canales

A flaring event at the Javelina processing plant in Corpus Christi

Earlier this month, StateImpact Texas, NPR and the Center for Public Integrity reported on a secret EPA ‘watch list’ that shows repeated violations of environmental laws in the country by industry. The list showed that even though many facilities throughout the country were violating the law, the EPA and state agencies weren’t enforcing those laws in a timely manner.

Now the EPA has officially released the list on its website. As the Center for Public Integrity reports, the EPA has gone one step further and published other watch lists including “serious or chronic violators of the Clean Water Act, governing the release of pollutants in waterways, and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, involving hazardous waste disposal.”

What does this mean for environmental regulation and enforcement? Will the new information lead to more lawsuits and litigation against polluters?

The Center for Public Integrity found evidence that industry attorneys are already preparing for such an outcome:

“We would expect environmental groups to scrutinize facilities on the list carefully as they consider potential citizen action suits,” wrote lawyers at Washington D.C. law firm Arnold & Porter in an advisory to clients. “The list may also provide fodder for plaintiffs’ attorneys seeking to bring toxic tort suits.” The lawyers, Jonathan Martel, Michael Daneker and Joel Gross, also speculated that energy extraction industries — oil, gas, coal and hydraulic fracturing — “might be especially prone to inclusion” on the Clean Air Act watch list.

You can read all of our reporting on the EPA list and the effects of several chronic violators on communities in Texas on our toxic emissions topic page.