Industries may be gaming EPA’s air pollution monitoring network to foil full tracking of their emissions, the agency’s in-house watchdog concluded in a new analysis that calls for more oversight.
Because the agency had previously posted its schedule for “intermittent” pollution monitoring sites online, ‘“this allows regulated entities to know when monitoring will occur and to adjust their emissions accordingly,” the EPA inspector general wrote in a report released Thursday.
As a result, those entities may be more releasing more pollution than intended under Clean Air Act requirements, auditors found, “and air quality may unknowingly remain worse than the health-based standard.”
While their analysis did not turn up evidence of “malicious behavior” at any specific site, the report noted a previously disclosed incident in which an unnamed Texas entity used state-supplied data “to alter its emission patterns to reduce the pollution detected at a nearby air monitor.”
