EPA ECHO Facility Radius Search

Find every EPA-regulated facility within a radius of a US address — with distance, direction, compliance status, inspections, enforcement actions and penalties.

Give it a property address and a search radius. It returns each regulated facility inside that radius, sorted nearest first, straight from EPA's own Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) database.

Commercial environmental database vendors sell this radius search as a per-property report for $250–$415. The regulatory-records half of that product is a query against a free federal API. This Actor is that query, done carefully.

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What you get

One summary record per location, then one facility record per site.

Each facility record carries:

Where	distance in miles and feet, compass direction, bearing, full address, coordinates
What it is	facility name, EPA Registry ID, SIC and NAICS codes, federal-facility flag
Which programs	Clean Air Act, NPDES/Clean Water Act, RCRA hazardous waste, Safe Drinking Water Act, Toxics Release Inventory, Risk Management Plan, TSCA, and Superfund/SEMS — each with its program ID
Compliance	current status overall and per program, Significant Non-Compliance flag, quarters in non-compliance over 3 years
Inspections	inspection count, date of last inspection, days since
Enforcement	informal and formal action counts, date of last formal action
Penalties	penalty count, total penalty dollars, last penalty date and amount
Follow-up	a working link to EPA's Detailed Facility Report

The summary record gives facility counts by program, how many sites are in Significant Non-Compliance, how many have formal actions or penalties, total penalty dollars in the radius, Superfund/SEMS site count, how many have never been inspected, and the nearest facility.

Input

{
  "addresses": ["233 S Wacker Dr, Chicago, IL 60606"],
  "radiusMiles": "0.25",
  "maxFacilitiesPerLocation": 500,
  "onlyWithEnforcement": false
}

Addresses are geocoded with the US Census Bureau geocoder. If an address will not match — rural parcels, new construction, unaddressed sites — pass the point directly instead:

{ "coordinates": [{ "latitude": 41.8789, "longitude": -87.6366, "label": "Site A" }] }

Up to 25 locations per run. radiusMiles accepts 0.05 to 5; 0.25 is the default because a quarter mile is the radius commercial database reports use for a property screen.

Who this is for

• Environmental consultants assembling the regulatory-records section of a site assessment
• Commercial real-estate and lending due diligence on an acquisition or refinance
• Brownfield and redevelopment teams scoping a parcel before committing
• EHS and compliance teams watching regulated neighbours around a plant
• Journalists and researchers mapping enforcement around a neighbourhood

What this is NOT

This is not an ASTM E1527-21 Phase I Environmental Site Assessment. Say so to anyone who asks. ECHO covers federal permitting, compliance and enforcement. A Phase I additionally requires state UST/LUST and spill registries, historical land-use sources (fire insurance maps, city directories, aerial photography, title records) and the opinion of an environmental professional — none of which this Actor provides. Use it for the federal regulatory-records layer, and for screening before you commission the full report.

A blank compliance status is not a clean site. ECHO leaves a field null where a facility is not covered by that program or has no determination on record. Only 97 of 760 facilities in a sample downtown Chicago square mile carry an inspection date at all. Null means not reported, never compliant, and this Actor never converts one into the other — everInspected and facilitiesNeverInspected are there so the distinction is visible.

How it protects you from silently wrong answers

A property screen that quietly misses facilities is worse than no screen. The guards below all abort the run rather than return a plausible-looking short list:

• Completeness. ECHO reports how many facilities are in the radius. Every page is read and the received row count is checked against that total. A partial read fails instead of reporting a cleaner property than the truth.
• Geometry. Every returned facility's own coordinates are re-measured against the search point. If any site falls outside the requested radius, the run fails rather than reporting a distant facility as a neighbour.
• Freshness. Before any search runs, a dense reference area is queried and its newest inspection date compared against today. A frozen snapshot that still answers HTTP 200 is caught here; the measured age is reported in every summary record so you can watch the trend yourself.
• Format drift. ECHO dates are text MM/DD/YYYY and penalties are strings like "$241,562". Both are parsed strictly — an unrecognised format aborts the run instead of becoming a silent null.
• Throttling. EPA limits requests per IP. Throttles are retried with backoff, and if the limit cannot be cleared the run fails rather than degrading into a short list.
• Geocoding. The Census geocoder returns x = longitude and y = latitude. The resolved point is bounds-checked against US territory, so a swapped pair can never silently search the wrong hemisphere.

An unmatched address returns status: "unresolved_address" and is not charged.

Pricing

Pay per event, with platform usage costs included:

Event	Price
Location screened	$3.00
Facility record returned	$0.01

A typical quarter-mile property screen returning ~75 facilities costs about $3.75, against $250–$415 for a commercial database report. Only locations that actually resolve and pass every guard are charged.

Data source and licence

• EPA ECHO REST services — echodata.epa.gov — keyless, documented, versioned. Facility search and paged retrieval.
• US Census Bureau geocoder — geocoding.geo.census.gov — keyless.

Both are US federal public services. ECHO data is a US Government work in the public domain, published by EPA explicitly for public reuse. No login, no CAPTCHA, no rate-limit circumvention, no scraping of an HTML application.

ECHO is refreshed by EPA on a rolling basis and enforcement data reaches it with a lag of weeks to months — that lag is inherent to the source, not to this Actor, and the summary record reports the newest inspection date it observed so you can judge it for yourself.

Report a data error in the underlying records to EPA at https://echo.epa.gov/resources/general-info/report-data-error.