Matthew Berdyck Releases EPA Superfund Site Records Downloader
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES, January 6, 2019 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Matthew Berdyck in partnership with ToxicWasteSites.org, is proud to announce the release of their EPA Superfund Toxic Waste Site Records Downloader software.
The Superfund is a US EPA project to clean up the worst of the worst toxic waste sites in The United States. There are currently over 1,300 massive toxic waste sites on the Superfund's National Priorities List (NPL), but only around 400 of them have been cleaned up in the last 38 years, since the inception of the controversial project.
Berdyck said, "Activists and journalists that would like to research these sites are often left with the arduous task of locating and downloading all of the relevant records. The Superfund downloader streamlines this process, allowing a researcher to quickly locate and acquire all electronically available records for any given toxic waste site."
The software was conceptualized by our publisher, Matthew Berdyck, and was coded by Alex Hwang, who is a Silicon Valley software engineer that has worked for Reuters, Google, and Facebook.
Hwang's most recent project was working on Facebook's team that determined the identities and informed Facebook users if they had become victims of Russian social media propaganda orchestrated during the 2016 election.
Together, Berdyck and Hwang created SuperfundResearch.org, in 2014, an organization which investigates toxic groundwater plumes, cancer clusters, corruption surrounding the redevelopment of former Superfund sites, and conducts Freedom of Information Act and Python-based data mining efforts.
The organization is currently conducting the largest FOIA project in US history, attempting to acquire and release over a half-billion pages of previously unreleased Superfund records, in which it's estimated that only 5% of these records are available on the US EPA's website.
Berdyck said, "We've humorously been called the 'Wikileaks of Toxic Waste' by some of our fans, but that's a bit of an overstatement because none of the records we are releasing are classified. They've just never been released on a wide scale, national format. I'm most certainly not living in an embassy."
The organization has been involved in many powerful causes, from being the first organization that called the corruption at the Region 5 EPA that later led to the Flint Water Crisis, to investigating and exposing a federally confirmed cancer cluster in Moab, Utah.
The .org also bills itself as the only national organization of its type that doesn't raise funds.
"We've paid for all of this out of our own pockets, to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars, because it's a cause both of us deeply care about. We'll never raise funds because as a victim of a toxic waste that was in my childhood neighborhood, I view it as blood money."
Discussing the legality of the Superfund records downloader, he said, "It's been proven repeatedly in the courts that while the government might not like it, data mining of public records is not a crime."
The download and instructions can be found in the featured on ToxicWasteSites.org, in the form of a Dropbox link.
The application is currently in beta format and is expected to be developed into a web app in January of 2019.
Matthew Berdyck
Daily Independent Journal
