The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has made some changes to the way it stores data as part of the Superfund program. Specifically, the EPA announced that it would be retiring CERCLIS, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Information System, and replacing it with a more modern system called Superfund Enterprise Management System (SEMS).
The EPA had used CERCLIS to store information about releases, cleanups and enforcement activities since the beginning of the Superfund act—which was more than 30 years ago. The change to SEMS is largely driven by the need to bring the database system in line with modern technology, so I would doubt that the volume, type, or quality of the data will be unchanged from what we were able to access in CERCLIS. Nonetheless, this program increases the accessibility of data on sites and makes the process of generating a Phase I Environmental Site Assessment just one little bit easier.