Data sources & methodology

22 systems · federal + Texas + California + Pennsylvania + Florida · checked nightly

Everything EHS Recon shows you comes from public government databases — named below, monitored nightly, with every change recorded. This page is the complete list of what we watch and how.

How monitoring works

Every night we download the current published copy of each covered database, archive it permanently, and compare it field by field against the record's history. New violations, inspections, enforcement actions, missing-report flags, status changes, and state-versus-federal disagreements become alerts; everything else is kept as history. Because agencies restate and reload entire files, records that disappear are quarantined for several cycles before anyone is alerted — a vanished record is usually a reload, not an event.

Alerts fire on posting date — the day the government database published the change — never on the underlying event date, and every report shows a "data current through" date per source. Water compliance data in particular lags 60–90 days behind the events it describes; we show you that honestly rather than pretending otherwise.

What each night's check found — how many records changed, at how many facilities, and how many new disagreements between two government records — is published on the Nightly Log. The ways the government's own files are wrong or contradict each other, and what we do about each, are listed on What We Watch For.

The systems we monitor

Where the front-page numbers come from

Every figure on our home page is a live count from the production database, reproducible on request. As of August 2026: 48M+ records analyzed is the event archive row count across the ten systems above — with substantial history back 35+ years (over half a million records from the 1980s alone, a million-plus from the 1990s). 416,518 removed without tracking is our ledger of records that appeared in an official file and later vanished from it with no public log — largely a West Virginia paperwork-violation recalculation we observed in August 2026; we retain every removed record with the dates we saw it appear and disappear. The next three were measured on October 21, 2026, and each counts a record that is in one government's file and not the other's, however new. 45,000+ with no permit on file is two lists: 37,786 facilities on EPA's own list of unpermitted facilities (the water file's record type for a facility that discharges without the required permit) that hold no permit in EPA's file or in a state file we load, in every state; and 8,942 facilities California's stormwater program has cited for operating without a required permit (9,406 citations). A facility can be on both lists: at least 45 are, by name and ZIP code. Only 671 of California's carry a name and address to compare, and 59 of those match by name, so we put the overlap under 800. 26,000+ permits in one file only is 26,192 facilities, each counted once: 25,585 whose permit or hazardous-waste registration the state lists as active while EPA's file holds no record of that id (California 17,512, Texas 5,878, Florida 1,511, Pennsylvania 684), and 607 whose permit EPA lists in force while the state's file holds no record of it (Texas 487, Florida 94, California 26). That second direction is counted only where the state file we load is the whole list for that kind of permit — never Pennsylvania, whose construction, mining and conservation-district permits sit in other offices' files, and not California's or Florida's general permits and stormwater coverages, which those states keep under their own numbers or in files we do not load. 137,000+ violations in one file only is California's: its stormwater file holds 181,006 violations and enforcement actions, and EPA's file holds 43,888 records of those kinds for the same California stormwater and unpermitted ids, so at least 137,118 of the state's records can have no federal counterpart. Inspections are not counted. It is California's alone because California's is the one state violations file we load. 100% severity classified means every violation in the archive carries a type and severity class — real limit exceedances, paperwork lapses, and schedule findings are never blended.

Coverage at a glance

What this means for you

• You find out the night a change posts — not whenever someone next remembers to re-check. A weekly manual check leaves up to a week of blind spot; our check runs every night.
• One search shows the whole facility — air, water, waste, chemical releases, and state records matched into one picture, instead of separate lookups across nine federal systems and each state's own.
• State-versus-federal disagreements surface on their own — conflicts that are invisible to any single-database check, because no one database contains them.
• Real exceedances stand apart from paperwork — every violation carries a severity class, so a missed report never buries a measured limit violation.

How this compares with checking by hand

Why we built this

The public record about a single facility lives in ten databases run by four governments — and those databases don't check each other. Assembling one honest picture meant separate searches, manual cross-matching, and no way to know when anything changed; the disagreements between state and federal copies of the same permit went unexamined entirely. The data is public. The hours it takes to assemble — and the changes nobody was watching for — are the problem we built EHS Recon to remove.

What we are — and aren't

EHS Recon is an independent public-records information service. We are not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the EPA, TCEQ, or any government agency. We report what government databases publicly display and when it changed — we don't provide legal or compliance advice, and the government source linked in every alert remains the authoritative record.

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