State-Of-Black-Oregon-2015

APPENDIX F cont.• The ECSI database only includes contaminated sites reported to DEQ knows about—meaningthere are likely additional sites not included in this data set. According to the DEQ, sites areadded to the ECSI database through the following means: “investigative efforts by DEQ’s SiteAssessment Program; referrals from other DEQ programs or from other agencies; reportsof chemical spills; citizen reports/complaints; or data submitted voluntarily by site owners/operators.”• A site being listed in the ECSI database does not necessarily imply that it is actuallycontaminated.• Confirmation of contamination is not a requirement in order for a site to be listed in the ECSIdatabase.• The environmental hazard level varies widely and is not easily measured among the sites listedin the ECSI database.• There is no clear way to categorize the ECSI sites by their level of hazard. The absence of thisinformation makes it difficult, if not impossible to accurately assess the level of risk a site posesto nearby populations.• The density of known or potentially contaminated sites is not measured.• The distance calculations only measure the distance from the center of each census tract to thenearest single ECSI site; therefore this measurement does not capture the densities of known orpotentially contaminated sites relative to census tracts with high percentages of Black residents.• In summary the data available for analyzing issues of environmental justice are in manycases incomplete, limited in scope, and are not kept up to date. Due to these limitations, PRCrecommends that any future analysis of environmental justice in Portland must rely on a morerobust dataset or employ advanced spatial methods.194