Last week, our region had the worst air quality in the country.
Last week, the DEP excluded NEPA from its warnings.
We didn't need the warning last week to know something was wrong. But things aren't always as obvious.
As this Editorial states, "But the DEP’s failure is alarming because it raises questions about the agency’s capability to inform people in NEPA when the danger is not so obvious. It also exacerbates the justified lack of trust that so many local people have in the agency because of its blithe approval of the massive and massively unwarranted expansion of the Keystone landfill."
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DEP suffers sensory deprivation
BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Environmental calamities often are noxious feasts for the senses, incorporating smells, sights and even sounds that point to dangerous conditions.
But regarding Northeast Pennsylvania, the state Department of Environmental Protection seems to have developed an alarming pattern of sensory deprivation.
A few years ago, as scores of people in Dunmore, the Midvalley and Jefferson Twp. complained of an eye-watering stench wafting from the sprawling and towering Keystone Sanitary Landfill, the DEP managed not to detect it.
Even more remarkably, as smoke from Canadian wildfires enveloped Northeast Pennsylvania on Tuesday and the multiagency federal government website AirNow.gov reported that the region had the worst air quality in the United States, the DEP excluded all of NEPA from its “code orange” air-quality warning.
The warning included only Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, the Lehigh Valley-Berks region and the Susquehanna Valley region of south-central Pennsylvania, including Harrisburg and Lancaster.
Asked why the DEP had excluded NEPA, the DEP unleashed a blizzard of bureaucratic obfuscation.
A spokeswoman said the agency’s forecasting models for airborne ozone and particulate matter include only the state’s four most populous regions that the DEP regularly monitors. Only about 900,000 people live in NEPA counties.
NEPA’s immersion in Canadian wildfire smoke was not a forecast. It happened in real time, even as the DEP warned other parts of the state as if NEPA was bathed in sunshine. And the AirNow conclusion that NEPA had the nation’s worst air quality was based partially on the DEP’s own data.
NEPA residents didn’t need government advice to recognize the danger because they saw and smelled the smoke. And local media used other sources to warn residents.
But the DEP’s failure is alarming because it raises questions about the agency’s capability to inform people in NEPA when the danger is not so obvious. It also exacerbates the justified lack of trust that so many local people have in the agency because of its blithe approval of the massive and massively unwarranted expansion of the Keystone landfill.
Gov. Josh Shapiro and DEP Secretary Richard Negrin should not take the latest DEP failure as a one-off mistake, but as a call for a top-to-bottom review of the agency’s emergency systems and policies.
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