Enforcement and Compliance History Online
Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) is a public website and database operated by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It brings together compliance and enforcement information for more than one million regulated facilities across the United States. ECHO lets users search facilities, find EPA enforcement cases, analyze compliance and enforcement data, use data services, and send information to the EPA.
ECHO shows how facilities are regulated, when they were inspected, whether violations were found, and whether enforcement action followed. The data cover permits, inspection and evaluation dates and findings, violations, enforcement actions, and penalties.
History
Pilot (2002)
The EPA released ECHO as a pilot tool on 20 November 2002 and asked the public for comment. At launch it gave access to the compliance records of more than 800,000 regulated facilities, including nearly 60,000 in New England. The tool was built with the Environmental Council of the States (ECOS), the national association of state and territorial environmental commissioners.
The pilot combined EPA and state compliance information for facilities regulated under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Data were updated monthly and covered a two-year period. Use grew over the following years, and the system came to answer about two million queries a year.
ECHO 2.0 and later releases
In December 2013 the EPA released ECHO 2.0, a full redesign that replaced the old mainframe system with a faster and easier interface. The first 2.0 release supported cross-system searches but offered limited access to program-specific data. Further releases followed in 2014:
Release |
Date |
Main changes |
|---|---|---|
ECHO 2.1 |
21 March 2014 |
Added Safe Drinking Water Act searches, including data on how large and how long violations were, and a redesigned Enforcement Case Report. Introduced the first web services for outside developers. |
ECHO 2.1.1 |
18 April 2014 |
Added searches for facilities near tribal land, facilities regulated under specific Clean Air Act MACT subparts, and facilities tied to EPA formal enforcement actions. Added greenhouse gas release columns. |
Data download update |
24 April 2014 |
National download files moved from annual to weekly refreshes, with several years of Clean Water Act Discharge Monitoring Report data added. |
ECHO 2.2 |
24 June 2014 |
Added Clean Water Act searches and detailed effluent data. Violation details became available within about a week of being reported, instead of after the earlier five to six month delay. |
ECHO 2.3 |
10 September 2014 |
Added Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (hazardous waste) compliance searches and civil enforcement case searches. |
Data
Sources
ECHO takes its data from several EPA national systems, including the Facility Registry System (FRS), which holds facility identification information, and the Integrated Compliance Information System (ICIS). ICIS Federal Enforcement and Compliance covers EPA inspections and enforcement under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, CERCLA, EPCRA, FIFRA, the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act, and the Toxic Substances Control Act. Clean Air Act stationary source data moved from the older Air Facility System to ICIS-Air, with the last AFS extract made in October 2014.
Civil cases come from ICIS and criminal cases from the Summary of Criminal Prosecutions database. ECHO also covers industrial stormwater, biosolids, and Toxics Release Inventory data.
Time coverage and updates
- Facility searches show five years of inspection and enforcement data.
- The Detailed Facility Report shows ten years of compliance and enforcement data.
- Three years of compliance status are shown as quarters of the federal fiscal year.
- All years of EPA formal enforcement action data from ICIS are available through the Enforcement Case Search.
- Data are usually refreshed weekly. ECHO data are snapshots of the source databases, and it can take from a week to three months for new entries to appear.
Tools
- Facility search – find facilities by ID, permit, program (air, water, hazardous waste, drinking water), location, industry, or enforcement and compliance activity.
- Corporate Compliance Screener – summarizes compliance and enforcement data across several facilities owned or run by one company.
- Enforcement Case Search – searches civil and criminal enforcement cases.
- Air Pollutant Report – shows ten years of facility-level air emissions data by pollutant and EPA program.
- Effluent Charts – charts and tables of permit limits, discharges, and violations for Clean Water Act NPDES permits.
- DMR Loading Tool – analysis of Discharge Monitoring Report data.
- Web services and data downloads – nationwide datasets and APIs for use in other applications.
The EPA gives example uses such as finding major hazardous waste generators in a ZIP code, petroleum refineries with several violations in the past five years, facilities in non-attainment areas that have not been inspected recently, and facilities reporting large toxic chemical releases.
Users
The EPA designed ECHO so that both members of the public and industry could look up the current environmental compliance records of regulated facilities.
See also
- Environmental law in the United States
- Open data in the United States