NJ DEP Doesn’t Do That Anymore

Lack of DEP Water Reports Allows Media And Faux Green Groups To Spin

Available DEP Data Ignored

DEP Scientists’ Recommendations For Stricter Regulations Ignored

I added the below information as an update to my recent post criticizing NJ Spotlight’s coverage of the Highlands and Delaware Watershed, specifically for relying on cherry picked data and broadly spun platitudes of praise by Murphy DEP cheerleaders.

But it really deserves a post of its own, so here it is.

Someone needs. to tell NJ Spotlight reporters that they don’t have to rely on Wm. Penn funded groups for cherry picked data and amateur assessments of current water quality conditions and trends in water quality.

1. The Clean Water Act mandates that DEP publish Statewide Water Quality Reports (known as the Section 305(b)/303(d) integrated Report)

DEP still does that, but probably only because EPA makes them do it.

2. For groundwater pollution data, DEP used to issue Private Well Testing Act reports, but no longer does so.

3. For threats to public drinking water supplies, see DEP’s Source Water Assessment Program – find the needle buried in the DEP website haystack and hit the link to find specific threats to specific water systems. Then wade through to the end of those documents to find the real threats buried at the end. Of course the data are over 20 years old.

Now do that exercise 566 times, once for every town in the State. You must do it now, because DEP doesn’t do that anymore.

4. For enforcement data, don’t even ask about the legislatively mandated annual Clean Water Enforcement Act Report – DEP stopped issuing that many years ago (2010) in blatant violation of law, but with no accountability, no media, no environmental group criticism, and no consequences.

5.  For DEP failure to regulate, there are those dirty dozen of so toxic chemicals for which the Drinking Water Quality Institute (DWQI) recommended drinking water standards (MCLs) be set for to protect public health, but DEP ignored those recommendations and never adopted the standards.

Maybe some enterprising environmental groups might help you out, but they don’t do this work anymore either.

6. For the toxic coverup, finally, the real secret: the over 500 unregulated chemicals that DEP knows are present in NJ drinking water.

This includes unregulated pharmaceuticals that the DWQI and DEP KNOW are in your drinking water, see:

• USGS Study Documents High Levels of Prescription Drugs In Streams – Source is Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Plants

• Manufacturing Facilities Release Pharmaceuticals to the Environment (USGS)

Again, DEP scientists recommended that DEP act to impose regulations to require treatment to remove them (see DEP’s April 2010 Report), but DEP never acted on those recommendations either.

Go try to get a Wm. Penn grant to do this work and educate the public and hold DEP accountable.

Oh, I forgot: Wm Penn doesn’t fund any work that might hold Big Pharma and the chemical industry accountable and in NJ, Big Pharma gets a Big Pass from NJ’s lame media.

More on Big Pharma to follow – someone’s got to do it and it might as well be me.