EPA defends policy on spills

A senior official with the Environmental Protection Agency has defended the agency's policy on notifying the public of industrial spillages and leakages after a senior figure in the Green Party called for a more proactive approach by the agency to public notification.
Kieran O'Brien, programme manager of licence enforcement in the office of environmental enforcement in the EPA said he was satisfied that industries were notifying the agency of significant spillages and leakages in keeping with the agency's licensing requirements.
"I am satisfied that the guidance is quite clear and that industry has a good understanding of what is required in terms of incident notification and that they know that we take a very serious view of any failure to notify us of an incident," said Mr O'Brien.
He was responding to former Cork South Central Green Party TD Dan Boyle who expressed concerns that the agency was not posting details of industry
incidents in recent months as frequently as it did when it first launched the service in August 2005.
Mr Boyle was commenting in the wake of a leakage of 100 litres of methanol vapour at Pfizer's plant at Little Island, Co Cork, last month, and he was especially critical of the EPA's policy of notifying the public of the leakage.
"I fully accept the EPA's report on the leakage and I accept that it doesn't present any dangers to the public, but I'm very disappointed with the manner in which people learned about this through the newspapers two days later," he said.

Barry Roche
© 2007 The Irish Times