U.P.: EPA is destroying records

[Omaha Steve]

Source: Omaha World Herald-AP

Union Pacific wants a judge to order the Environmental Protection Agency to stop destroying records the railroad requested about lead contamination in Omaha.

The railroad filed its lawsuit Wednesday. UP quotes from several e-mails where an EPA supervisor encourages employees to delete messages so they won't be releasable as public records.

The EPA and Union Pacific have been trying for years to settle who should pay more than $50 million to clean up 5,600 lead-contaminated properties.

Read more: http://www.omaha.com/article/20100623/NEWS97/706239851#u-p-epa-is-destroying-records

---

See the FULL story.

[jwirr]

1. Old railroad records should be placed in Historical Society Archives.

Our historical society had to clean out a room for the DMNR records.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. An interesting role reversal here.

[Heywood J]

3. Record destruction can often be considered

consciousness of guilt, especially when there's a paper trail ordering the destruction. It'll be interesting to see how this goes.

[Oceansaway]

4. K&R...n/t

[TheMadMonk]

5. How's this for a dumb idea?

I think we can be fairly safe in assuming that enforcement and penalty of will both increase after the gulf debacle.

We can at least hope so.


In addition of course to putting their own house in order, allow infringing companies to pay fines in the form of legacy site remediation. Or much as it might stick in our craw, even pure research on disaster mittigation and recovery and establishing standby infrastructure.

Also incentivise compliance with things like bonus carbon credits and official govt. guaranteed insurance ratings.

[wordpix]

6. who's the supervisor, a BushCo appointee? Sounds like one

:grr: let the chips fall where they may, EPA under BushCo was another MMS