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PR NEW EPA INTERNET WEBSITE MAKES ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION FOR EACH NEIGHBORHOOD MORE EASILY ACCESSIBLE

Release Date: 08/06/98
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U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol M. Browner today unveiled an Internet Website that will allow citizens to easily obtain up-to-date, comprehensive, accurate environmental information about their communities simply by entering a zip code. The Website is part of the Clinton Administration’s right-to-know programs that are designed to provide Americans with needed information about local pollution.
The new Internet website is accessible at: https://www.epa.gov/ceis.

The source of the new Website, the Center for Environmental Information and Statistics (CEIS), was set up in March 1998 by Browner to improve public access to reliable and comprehensive information needed by citizens to protect their health and environment. It is a national, source of reliable and comprehensive data and information on the state of and trends in environmental quality.

Unlike other websites, the CEIS Website is formatted in an interpretive manner for individual counties rather than a line-by-line listing of data.

“The Center for Environmental Information and Statistics is a giant step forward in providing the American people with accurate, timely, and easy-to-understand, easy-to-access environmental and public health information,” Browner said. “Anyone can quickly obtain a snapshot of air and water quality, hazardous waste and toxic chemicals in their own community, all on a single Webpage which can become a focal point for community partnerships, an education tool for young people and an invaluable reference tool in libraries.”

For anyone not having a personal computer and a modem, the Website is accessible on computers in most public libraries, through the cooperation of the American Library Association, in 24 federal EPA offices nationwide and in the 1,363 Federal Government Depository Libraries across the country; each state has six or more Depository Libraries in state universities or elsewhere.

Volumes of EPA air, water, toxics and waste information which are available but often are inaccessible to the average citizen, will now be available to anyone using a computer and a modem. The user can pinpoint the search to his or her own community and even create a map of their own community using the “community mapper” feature. Specific subject area EPA web sites are linked to the CEIS website. Most important, the CEIS Website provides contextual information which explains the meaning of the secured data.

For the first time, everyone with Internet access can find in one place a variety of useful information, including:

•environmental profiles for each state, county and territory, a starting point for understanding EPA’s data on environmental quality and changes in conditions over time, at the state or community level; the profiles include information on air and water quality, drinking water, and hazardous wastes and toxic releases county by county;
•a digital library which lets users search more than 100 EPA reports on environmental quality and a number of other environmental reports at the community, state, regional and national levels; and,
•an atlas of maps covering a wide range of environmental topics.

The CEIS Website can also zero in on a specific place or topic, link data and information at state and county levels, explain the data and what it means, dig into EPA data sets and programs to serve technical information users, and, describe how the data were collected, their applicability and limitations.

EPA’s Internet homepage, to which the new one-stop source is linked, is being visited close to 35-million times a month, proving the interest of Americans in obtaining environmental information through their computers.

The new website resulted from consultation with over 300 regular users of information on EPA through its homepage or other sources of information. Asked what they needed, most requested that information be formatted on the community level and be available on the Internet.

Feedback from CEIS Website users is encouraged. There is an area of the website that allows the user to recommend other information and interpretation which would be useful.

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