BEAT Demands Action on Diesel ‘Spill’ and Construction Dumping into River in Pittsfield
After reading the story in the Berkshire Eagle about the diesel fuel spill into the Housatonic River on December 31, 2020, BEAT contacted both the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to push for fines to be issued in this case, as well as in a case over the summer of a contractor illegally dumping construction waste down the river bank at another location in Pittsfield.
First, we checked to the DEP Enforcement Action webpage, only to find that the DEP has switched to a new format that strips all relevant information from the website. The old webpages gave detailed information by year and month. BEAT has asked that the DEP make a slight change to have the municipality listed right after the date, so we could quickly find the Berkshire County violations. Due to a lack of funding, we have stopped updating our enforcement actions webpages. If we had a volunteer willing to take on this project, however, we would like to resume this watchdog function.
The new DEP enforcement database is time consuming to look up each specific enforcement action and read through the entire document to try to find what the violation was. There is an “Export to Excel” link, but when we tried, nothing actually exported. The database does make clear that the DEP fails to issue fines for many, many violations. In fact, it looks as if issuing a fine is the exception rather than the rule. We need our environmental protection agency to make the polluters pay, otherwise it falls on the municipalities to pay and that comes out of residents pocketbooks.
We need a state environmental protection agency that actually protects the environment. In previous administrations we had just that, but the current administration is failing miserably! Please, contact the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection’s Commissioner Martin Suuberg <Martin.Suuberg@State.MA.US> and the Governor’s Office <constituent.services@state.
