Citizen Reports

If you observe a pollution incident, take note of details that will help the agency investigate or follow up on the report and provide the information when submitting a report. 

• Who is responsible for the incident

• What is the issue (e.g., illegal disposal of waste, discharge of pollutants to surface water)

• When did the incident happen and if it is on-going

• Where it happened

• What has been impacted (e.g., soil, surface water, groundwater)

• Other information (e.g., weather conditions, site conditions)

The information you provide will be forwarded to a Pollution Response Coordinator for investigation and follow up. 

NOTE: If you would like to make an anonymous complaint, please do not provide your name or contact information.  However, if you do not provide sufficient or accurate information, the agency may not be able to follow up on or investigate the complaint.  If you have any questions, please contact the Pollution Response Program in one of our six regional offices.

Regulated Entity Reports

Regulated entities may report spills, releases and other pollution incidents through the online reporting tool.  When making a report, be sure to include relevant information (e.g., applicable permit numbers) and contact information so that DEQ staff can follow up on the report. 

The public may view summaries of pollution incident reports using the Search Pollution Reports tool.  Search fields include: Incident Report Number (IR#), Date Range, and City/County. The report summaries may be downloaded.

The downloaded summaries do not include documents that may be on file with the agency.  To view documents associated with a pollution incident, you will need to submit a FOIA request. Please note that the file retention schedule for documents associated with pollution incidents is five years. If you submit a FOIA request for a pollution incident that occurred more than five years ago, there may not be documents associated with the database record. 

If downloaded information will be distributed to other entities, the following statement should be included:  "DEQ is the data source. DEQ does not certify that this data represents a complete record. This data is provided to the citizens of the Commonwealth free of charge and for informational purposes only."

Important Data Update

Please note that on September 9, 2022, the PReP myDEQ Portal was updated to improve overall data quality and better meet agency business needs. As part of the update, several field names have been changed and reorganized. Incidents reported prior to September 9, 2022 have not been updated to match the field name changes and should be read using the previous field names. The changes are as follows:

Please email database questions to coprep@deq.virginia.gov. 

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