LITTLE ROCK — It’s now easier to search for Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality inspection records since the department added new search options on its website.
The change comes nearly three months after an advocacy group issued a report that said the agency’s records were incomplete and hard to search.
“We have always taken pride in our transparency,” Department of Environmental Quality Director Teresa Marks said in a prepared statement. “But because of the sheer volume of documents we receive, the search engine hasn’t been as user friendly as we would have liked until now.”
Ryan Benefield, deputy director of the department, said the department had been working on the change before the policy panel’s September report. He contends that the new search options help solve some of the concern raised by the report.
The new database allows users to search inspections, complaints and violations by city, county and date.
Previ-ously, the website allowed users only to search permit histories and it was difficult to tell whether there had been violations based on searches.
“This is a new search tool that allows people to look up inspections,” Benefield said. “Which wasn’t offered before.”
A spokesman for the department said it had been updating its website when the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, a private nonprofit that seeks stricter regulation of the natural-gas industry, released a report saying the online database wasn’t user-friendly.
Bill Kopsky, executive director of the policy panel, said Thursday that the upgraded inspection records still need some work.
“The bigger problem we had is that the inspection files had no connection to the enforcement file,” Kopsky said. “In reality [the Environmental Quality Department] should link them so you can follow the whole train of files. When you look at one of these files, you should see inspections, and then the company’s response, then the agency’s response and then how it was resolved. It’s not that hard with a database like this already set up.”
The September report, titled “Violations of Water Quality Standards from Gas Production in Arkansas,” lookedat inspections and violations by companies operating in the Fayetteville Shale, a natural-gas field in north-central Arkansas that has grown from a few wells to more than 4,000.
To get the natural gas out of the rock, companies use hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, blasting millions of gallons of water into a well to break up the rock and release gas.
Kopsky also had problems when searching for violations in Van Buren County, the hub of the Fayetteville Shale. He found inspection reports from Union County.
“Shoot, this is the first time I am clicking on it, and I am already seeing problems,” he said. “The database is only as good as the data and their datais incorrect here.”
Benefield acknowledged that the outcome of a violation isn’t linked to the inspection report, but someone searching could go back and click on the permit history, which would show the company’s response to violations. He said the department is working on linking the two systems so people can navigate the website more easily.
The department could not say how much it cost to create the new search tool, saying only that its computer department had been working on it internally since July.
Another concern raised by Kopsky in that September report was the number of violations the companies operatingin the Fayetteville Shale were committing on a daily basis.
The 20-page report said that 538 inspections by the Department of Environmental Quality between July 2006 and August 2010 found gas companies out of compliance 54 percent of the time. Additionally, it said, the department failed to properly follow up with the violating companies or issues fines for the violations.
The department has two options when it finds a violation: It can require a company to write a letter explaining how it fixed the problem, or fine the company.
“Clicking around the website ... [ it] looks like [inspectors] are still finding significant violations,” Kopsky said.
Business, Pages 29 on 12/02/2011