Water Quality: Inconsistent State Approaches Complicate Nation's Efforts to Identify Its Most Polluted Waters

United States. General Accounting Office.

United States. General Accounting Office.

关键词: Government accountability -- United States.;    natural resources and environment;    water quality;    letter report;   

RP-ID  :  GAO-02-186
RP-ID  :  233349

美国|英语

来源: UNT Digital Library

【 摘 要 】

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) believes that more than 20,000 bodies of water throughout the country are too polluted to meet water quality standards. States use different approaches to identify impaired waters. This variation has led not only to inconsistencies in the listing of impaired waters but also to difficulties in identifying the total number of impaired waters nationwide and the total number of total maximum daily loads (TMDL) needed to bring such waters up to standards. Under the Clean Water Act and its regulations, EPA has given the states some flexibility to develop listing approaches that are tailored to their circumstances. However, some of the approaches have no appropriate scientific basis. States apply a range of quality assurance procedures to ensure the quality of data used to make impairment decisions. Although states have long used quality assurance procedures for the data they collect directly, they have become increasingly vigilant about applying such procedures to data from other sources. Because of inconsistencies in states' approaches to identifying impaired waters, the information in EPA's database of impaired waters is of questionable reliability. The number of impaired waters cannot be compared from one state to the next, and EPA cannot reliably tally the number of TMDLs that must be completed nationwide. EPA's database also distorts the size of some of the states' impaired waters when they are mapped on EPA's website."