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The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency has issued an Areawide Air Pollution Action Day for Sunday, July 19th. This is in addition to the ongoing Chicago Air Pollu tion Action Day in effect today July 18th. This alert includes all of Illinois’ Air Quality Index (AQI) forecast sectors, except Metro-East St. Louis. Visit www.AirNow.gov to stay up to date on current conditions. 

Regional Haze and BART SIP

The IEPA announces the release of the draft State Implementation Plan (SIP) revisions for Regional Haze and Best Available Retrofit Technology (BART), as required under U.S. EPA’s 1999 Regional Haze Rule.  U.S. EPA adopted the Regional Haze Rule to address visibility impairment in the nation’s protected parks and wilderness areas.  Even though there are no such areas in Illinois, the Regional Haze Rule requires that all states submit a SIP to provide for reasonable progress toward improving visibility, with the long term goal of achieving pristine visibility conditions in these protected areas.  One of the requirements is the application of BART for a specific subset of emission sources.  The Illinois EPA has determined that Illinois has 59 emission units located at 11 major emission sources that are subject to BART. 

The purpose of these documents is to describe how Illinois will meet the requirements of the Regional Haze rule, including BART.  The Illinois EPA will soon schedule a public hearing to be held in early October to receive comments on these documents.  Please submit comments and questions to:  epa.reghaze@illinois.gov

All documents are in Adobe Acrobat format.