Frasure Creek Mining (KY) Accused Of Falsifying Water Quality Reports - You Voted For This, Kentucky

[hatrack]

In a state where coal-country creeks run red with iron, Frasure Creek Mining has been unusually clean of late: Amid tens of thousands of measurements that it submitted to Kentucky regulators in 2013 and early 2014, fewer than 400 exceeded the state’s limits for water pollution from coal-mine runoff. Now environmental activists say they know why. In a letter released on Monday, four environmental groups said many of the monthly measurement reports that Frasure sent the state contained virtually identical data — line-for-line repeats of clean pollution reports submitted the month before.

The letter to Frasure and state and federal officials vowed to sue the company for what activists called tens of thousands of violations of the Clean Water Act unless Kentucky regulators act first. The act allows citizens to enforce the law if state regulators do not act within 60 days of a lawsuit threat.

EDIT

The disclosure could embarrass the state, not least because environmental activists caught Frasure and two other coal companies in the same scheme in 2010. Then, regulators promised to tighten their scrutiny of pollution reports and the laboratories that conduct pollution tests. Kentucky’s Energy and Environment Cabinet said in a blog post on Monday that it found violations in Frasure’s pollution reports during a compliance review last January, but declined to say whether they involved duplicate filings.

EDIT

But by spring 2013, after the state settled an enforcement case over the new violations, the company’s monthly pollution reports again began to repeat themselves. In all, environmentalists say, 210 of Frasure’s 282 monthly reports were wholly or partly duplicates of older ones, sometimes with minor variations. “Frasure Creek’s actions — and the Cabinet’s failures to act — undermine the regulatory framework that safeguards the people and waters of Kentucky,” the groups’ letter stated.

EDIT

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/18/us/clean-mining-a-deception-in-kentucky-groups-say.html

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. Is it just me, or does it seem fundamentally stupid to have companies be

'self-monitoring' their pollution levels and reporting it? Any even semi-competent coder could write up a program to randomly fill in levels within a given range of 'pollutants' to make reports that wouldn't self-repeat like this and would thus be unable to be caught like this by watchdog groups. Surely the only way to avoid having companies simply provide self-serving lies is to have independent monitoring performed by groups that aren't related to the companies being monitored, no?

[eppur_se_muova]

2. "Erasure Creek"? Well, there's a clue right there.