I had long suspected that the Clean Air Act was not only being routinely violated in Indiana, but that those violations were rarely being punished. Proving that suspicion, however, seemed impossible — until I read The New York Times’ Sept. 12, 2009, piece about violations of the Clean Water Act. The interactive graphic that accompanied the story linked to an U.S. Environmental Protection Agency database called ECHO, Enforcement and Compliance History Online , which I discovered also tracks Clean Air Act violations. Jackpot.

That meant that someone had already built a database showing not only every violation of the Clean Air ...

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates the nation's aging and overburdened sanitary sewer systems overflow at least 23,000 times a year and discharge between three billion and 10 billion gallons of raw sewage into streams, rivers and lakes. The problem is even bigger – 850 billion gallons bigger - when older sewer systems that discharge both storm water and sewage from the same pipe are included in the tally. But there is no national database to chronicle when, where and how much. The best the EPA has to offer is its Enforcement and Compliance History Online, a database known by its ...