The Record's Scott Fallon and James O'Neill published an interesting article today showing the results of The Record's study of North Jersey air pollution data, focusing mainly on data from the U.S. EPA. If the overview report they provide is concerning to you, the particulars are even more so. Fallon and O'Neill's "chemical map" does a great job highlighting some specific sources of toxic emissions in North Jersey.

So I spent the morning looking up more particulars in some towns and counties of New Jersey, statewide. What follows is a brief description of how you can go about it too, for your locality. For starters, you can find more specifics on air quality in parts of New Jersey by starting on the EPA - Region 2 Air web page. Even more detailed New Jersey Air Monitoring particulars by county are located here. There are many other forms of pollution, of course, and the EPA website provides a good starting point on many of them (see "quick finder" at the top).

I also looked at the NJ DEP "Data Miner" for specifics on a wider range of environmental issues in our towns and counties. Some of what I found:

• There is an easy way to check for NJ DEP Enforcement Actions in your county or town. This will show you a short description of all the environmental violations that the NJ DEP staff reported, the "status" of those violations, and whether there was a penalty assessed. Click here, then input your county, town, zip code, and date-range. Running the report usually takes a few seconds, depending on how broad your search is. The violations you'll see may relate to Air, Hazardous Waste, Water, Right To Know, TCPA, Land use, DPCC, Solid Waste, Pesticides, Site Remediation, and Radiation. For instance, if you live near where the Record publishes, you can learn that Walgreen's construction crews were washing out concrete trucks into the ground, not into a basin as required by law. Or you'll see that the Ridgewood Water Department failed to monitor for volatile organic compounds. Record reporting into the database began 10 years ago for Air, and more recently for Pesticides.
  

• There's also an easy way to check for Incidents and Complaints Reported by various sources (including the general public) in your county or town. For instance, in one town I searched, complaints ranged from arsenic contamination to laboratory medical waste in a stream. Grim but true.

• It's also useful to check for new permits that entities seek from the NJ DEP. For instance, is Wal-Mart planning a new supercenter in an ecologicallly fragile area near you? (Where will its parking lot runoff go when it rains?) Did a facility near you request a permit to emit a certain toxic chemical in its production process? Unfortunately, the DEP's "Environmental Permitting Dashboard" doesn't appear to let you search permit requests by county and town. I phoned the DEP Office of Record Access (609 341 3121) about this, and am trying to get more information. In the meantime, for Construction permits in particular, check the DEP's twice-monthly Bulletin, located here.

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