First Time Users

The U.S. EPA, state and local authorities are each responsible for monitoring whether facilities comply with federal environmental laws, such as:

ECHO is designed to give you both summary and detailed information about facilities' compliance and enforcement status and history.� ECHO's tools are designed to be simple yet provide sufficient detail to meet users needs. ECHO is currently being used:

• by the public to learn about regulatory oversight and to retrieve the compliance records of facilities in their community.
• by corporations to monitor compliance across facilities they own.
• by investors to supplement their assessments of environmental performance at the facility and corporate level.

Using ECHO involves two simple steps.

Step 1: Search for Facilities of Interest

You can search for your facility of interest in any of four ways:

• Quick Search: You can most easily look for facilities in your community by simply entering a ZIP code, or "city, state" within the Search Options box located on the ECHO homepage. The default results includes only the larger facilities in the ZIP code or city you selected.� If you would like to see all facilities subject to the federal environmental laws, select the radio button next to "All Facilities" located below the "GO" button you used for this search. If the search results screen indicates that your search returned too many results to display, you will be asked to modify your search through the All Data search page.
  
  
• All Data Search: This option allows you to search across the major environmental programs under which a facility might be regulated: air, water, and hazardous waste, but not yet including drinking water. This search method is most inclusive but might require you to review the details of why a particular facility is returned.
  
  
• Air/Water/Hazardous Waste/Drinking Water Data Search: These program-specific searches allow you greater flexibility in defining your search criteria. For example, the Water Data search tool allows you to look within a particular watershed (a map will help you find the watersheds) in which you might be interested.� The Air Data search allows you select from among the type facility, e.g., Major vs. Synthetic Minor vs. Minor -- each type is subject to different regulatory requirements.� These searches also return only facilities regulated by the particular program you selected to search.
  
  
• Multiple ID Search: This search allows you to track a known list of facilities (to use this interface, however, you will need a list of facilities' permits/identifiers). Users can "cut and paste" a list of IDs into a query form each month to get updated information on multiple facilities.

Step 2: Facility Counts and Lists Returned. Analyze, Sort, Download or Get Detailed Facility Reports

The above search methods will present you with a count of how many facilities met your criteria, a list of facilities that meet your search criteria, as well as summarized compliance data for each facility returned.� You can click on any of the facility names for details on that facility (Detailed Facility Report, or drinking water Public Water System Report) or download the entire table by clicking on "Download" at the bottom of the table.