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- Hacker News
- We made a map of facilities with Clean Water Act discharge permits (NPDES permits), colored by compliance status, synced from EPA's dataset every 2 weeks.
The National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) is a permit program established as part of the Clean Water Act. Facilities dumping into a body of water are required to have a permit and to periodically submit discharge water reports. A "violation" on the map means a facility exceeded the limits in its own permit or failed to submit a report.
Some specifics:
Data comes from EPA's ICIS-NPDES bulk exports, synced every 2 weeks.
There's ~550k facilities registered nationally.
We built a detailed view showing each facility's violation history (allowed limit vs. actual amounts for each pollutant, by quarter)