Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) has introduced legislation to create a comprehensive new program to measure mercury levels across the United States. The bipartisan "Comprehensive National Mercury Monitoring Act" is cosponsored by Senator Tom Carper (D-DE).
"This legislation would create a comprehensive nationwide mercury monitoring network to provide sound mercury measurements that EPA sorely needs," said Senator Collins.
This legislation would authorize $37 million in fiscal year 2011, $29 million in fiscal year 2012 and 2013, for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), United States Geological Survey, United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and National Park Service to create a nationwide mercury monitoring program. The legislation would establish mercury monitoring sites across the nation in order to measure mercury levels in the air, rain, soil, lakes and streams, and in plants and animals.
The legislation would provide new data to help address the flaws in EPA's existing mercury data, based largely on a computer model, which was used to justify the flawed Clean Air Mercury Rule issued in 2005.
"I was deeply troubled by the computer data which EPA used to justify its mercury rule. This data was neither peer-reviewed nor verified with scientific measurements, and yet EPA used as the basis for its mercury rule which does not account for mercury hotspots and which places children and pregnant women at risk," said Senator Collins. "Hopefully, the new measurements provided by this legislation will inform new mercury regulations which adequately protect human health and environment."
The legislation follows up on studies, by David Evers and Wing Goodale of the Biodiversity Research Institute in Gorham, Maine, Charles Driscoll of Syracuse University, Kathleen Fallon Lambert of the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation in Hanover, New Hampshire, and others. The studies demonstrate the existence of mercury hotspots in the northeastern United States and attribute much of the cause of the hotspots to power plant emissions. The studies showed that mercury deposition is five times higher than previously estimated by EPA near a coal plant in the vicinity of a biological mercury hotspot spanning southern New Hampshire and northeastern Massachusetts.
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