Why are the locations of some TOXMAP facilities slightly inaccurate?
The following provides more detailed information about the problems with TRI location data, EPA’s ongoing efforts to improve it, the limitations of FRS, and location accuracy in TOXMAP today. Problems with TRI, Limitations of FRS The EPA recommends use of addresses and coordinates from their Facility Registry System (FRS) (http://www.epa.gov/frs). TOXMAP only plots TRI facilities with defined FRS locations. Corrections to FRS are made year-round by EPA and are incorporated into TOXMAP annually with each year’s Public Data Release. This approach avoids many errors in the TRI location data. However, there are also limitations to FRS data, such as in the case of a large facility (tens or hundreds of square miles in area) that reports to multiple EPA programs. Since FRS only uses the “best” of the reported coordinates, a more accurate location for a TRI release could be overlooked (e.g. the street address coordinate is used because it is easily identified as “best”, but the TRI release act
