"The agency has been aware for more than a decade that companies are underreporting emissions, using equations developed by the petroleum industry that are often wrong."
"Brittany Liscord was at her job at the Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine in 2018 when, out of nowhere, she received a warning from a colleague. It was about the massive petroleum storage tanks near her home.
“It came up that I was a runner in South Portland, and I guess he had done some work in another city that had tanks,” she said. “He said to me, ‘You should be really concerned about the VOCs in your area.’”
Liscord went home and Googled “VOCs,” while flashing back to a college introductory class on environmental science where the instructor had talked about the damage air pollutants could do to your lungs. She read that in significant amounts, VOCs—volatile organic compounds—could be highly dangerous to health. Now all she could think about was the smell outside her home, a noxious stench that on the worst days even made its way inside."
