Hansen testifies
The state Department of Environmental Protection is facing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit over its refusal to provide a public interest law firm with a slice of agency data that shows recent water pollution levels at coal-mining operations across West Virginia.
Lawyers from Appalachian Mountain Advocates sued DEP in Kanawha Circuit Court after the agency turned down their request for “discharge monitoring report,” or DMR, data that mine operators are required to file with the agency to disclose pollution levels under state and federal clean water laws.
Last year, the group had asked DEP to provide the most recent quarterly DMR data for all coal mines statewide. Agency officials had previously provided similar data in an easy-to-use Microsoft Excel spreadsheet format, Appalachian Mountain Advocates said in its legal filings.
This time, though, DEP said that to provide the requested data, the agency “would have to research its databases and create a new record.” DEP said the state FOIA “does not require an agency to create or produce a record that does not exist at the time the request is made.”
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But during Monday’s hearing, Evan Hansen, an environmental consultant with a computer science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained that the current DEP website does not allow users to filter discharge monitoring reports for particular periods of time. The website requires users to examine one pollution report at a time, rather than downloading hundreds or even thousands of such reports in bulk for later analysis with a computer program, Hansen said.
Hansen testified that, using the current report-by-report DEP website, it would take him nearly 300 hours of work to put together a list of all pollution reports for one quarter. That compares to the one hour it previously took a DEP programmer to provide search the database to provide the same sort of data in response to a previous FOIA request, Hansen said. DEP charged Appalachian Mountain Advocates $37 for the programmer’s time responding to that request, Hansen said.
