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State regulators have been flooded with requests to ease environmental regulations as companies across the country say the pandemic is interfering with their ability to comply with laws that protect the public from pollution, according to a June 10 NPR story featuring an interview with IU McKinney Professor of Practice Janet McCabe.

In March, the Environmental Protection Agency told companies that they do not need to warn federal regulators if the pandemic interferes with routine pollution monitoring or testing.

In Indiana, the head of the state's environmental authority received a letter from Marathon Petroleum Corp. that asked for permission to delay or skip pollution monitoring and reporting at more than a dozen facilities.

The letter lists ten regulatory categories — eight of which appear in the EPA's memo — with which the company said it might not be able to comply because of the pandemic, including testing how much pollution comes out of smokestacks and drainage pipes, according to the NPR story.

"That was an extraordinarily broad request," Professor McCabe told NPR. "It just seems like it's totally taking advantage of the situation." The Indiana Department of Environmental Management, she noted, responded to the company asking for more information about their request.

Professor McCabe is director of the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University and a former EPA Acting Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation.