Washington, DC.... Official claims of cleaner rivers and streams over the past two decades cannot be supported due to a lack of reliable, scientifically verifiable information, according to a report written by specialists within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

The PEER report, entitled Murky Waters, gives an insider account of how EPA and its State partners, through a mix of politics, bureaucratic inertia and bad science, perpetuate the fiction that official water quality reports are valid by routinely presenting Congress and the public with conflicting, erroneous and manipulated data containing little accurate information on the actual condition of the nation's waterways.

Despite the Clean Water Act's 1972 mandate to create a water quality inventory to measure progress in cleaning the nation's waters today, the data simply does not exist to indicate whether the nation's rivers and
streams are truly becoming cleaner or more polluted, and why.  As detailed by PEER's report, reported improvements in water quality are far more likely the result of data-rigging than actual pollution reduction:
 

•  States are free to manipulate numbers in order to portray continuing water quality progress when, in fact, what fragmentary reliable data that exist suggest the opposite.

• States have no incentive to deliver accurate or consistent water quality reports to EPA.  As a result, inconsistencies in miles of waters monitored as well as how impairment is measured, produce little of value in determining national water quality trends;

• States are reporting one set of rosy data on water quality conditions for national inventory purposes and, in the same year, issuing different, more pessimistic numbers in order to obtain federal watershed restoration funds.

"EPA has yet to reject a state water quality report no matter how incomplete or scientifically invalid," said PEER General Counsel Todd Robins.  "EPA even allows states to simply ignore reporting requirements altogether, without any financial, administrative or regulatory consequences," added Robins.  Murky Waters also describes how negative critiques and scathing reviews from EPA's own regional offices, Science Advisory Board and Office of Inspector General are routinely ignored.

This PEER report contains a set of recommendations that do not call for more money to support water monitoring efforts but instead suggest a re-direction of, and quality control system for, the hundreds of millions of dollars spent each year to support the current dubious reporting regime.

PEER is a national alliance of state and federal employees working to improve the environmental performance of their own pollution control, land management or wildlife protection agencies.