A new study by a national environmental organization says government agencies aren't adequately monitoring air and water pollution or enforcing environmental standards in Greene County, where cancer rates are among the highest in the state and nation.

The Natural Resources Defense Council study released today says that in an area circumscribed by two coal-burning power plants, myriad coal ash piles and hundreds of abandoned coal mines the agencies should be actively gathering pollution data and researching potential links between the high cancer rates and the unhealthy levels of smog, soot and toxic chemicals.

Instead, the agencies have required only minimal air testing from a single Greene County monitor located in Holbrook, upwind of Allegheny Energy's Hatfield's Ferry power plant. The monitor tests for ozone, sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide, but not nitrogen oxides, soot, lead or any other air toxics.

The 66-page NRDC study with the double-duty title, "Pollution Unchecked," also says that the state Department of Environmental Protection has waived drinking water safety monitoring for toxins like arsenic, aluminum, manganese, beryllium and other industrial chemicals. The controversial statewide policy allows water companies to test for those contaminants only once every nine years.

"There's a lot of pollution in southwestern Pennsylvania that both the state and federal environmental agencies have been sweeping under the rug and haven't been monitoring," said Erik Olson, who co-authored the NRDC study. "It's a double whammy for the population because the agencies have been looking the other way."

Betsy Mallison, a DEP spokeswoman, said yesterday that the agency had no comment on the study but was reviewing its findings.

Without adequate monitoring data it's hard to enforce environmental and health standards and it's impossible for state agencies to determine if pollutants have caused or contributed to the higher cancer rates, said Farley Toothman, a former Greene County commissioner now heading the Monongahela Riverkeeper organization.

The Riverkeeper group and the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, a state-wide environmental organization, participated in the preparation of the study.

"There's an administrative and cultural bias against finding those sorts of things, but we should look for them and if we find them, deal with them," Toothman said. "There's a Molotov cocktail of environmental emissions out here that have to be impacting on the quality of the public drinking water."

The study criticizes the DEP for granting Greene County water suppliers a blanket testing waiver based on a few widely spaced and unreliable tests, and despite several tests that found high arsenic levels. It says the federal law allows testing waivers to be granted only on a case-by-case basis.

"The nine-year waivers for testing for arsenic and toxic chemicals are twisting the intent of the federal drinking water laws," Olson said, "and leaving citizens at risk."

Painted into the southwest corner of Pennsylvania by coalfield geography and an extraction-based economy, Greene County's 40,000 residents have an incidence rate for colon, rectal, lung and prostate cancers that is higher than the state and national rate, the study found in a review of state Department of Health statistics. Its lung cancer rate is third-highest among Pennsylvania's 67 counties. Its cancer death rate is also 8 percent higher than the state and nation as a whole.

"We can't say from the countywide data that's been collected if pollution is the cause of the higher cancer rate," Olson said. "We need much more detailed and specific data that no one is collecting or tracking."

Richard McGarvey, spokesman for the state Department of Health, said the department has no special monitoring, review or health assessment programs operating in Greene County.

"It's difficult if not impossible to link many cancers to specific causes and there are no known causes for many types of cancer," McGarvey said. "But it sounds like the study has been all through our statistics and that's the purpose of getting those numbers out, so people can see if there's something that needs to be done."

According to the study, the Hatfield's Ferry and Fort Martin coal-burning power plants owned by Allegheny Energy are significant sources of air, surface water and ground water pollution.

Hatfield's Ferry, which has a generating capacity of 1,710 megawatts and is the second-largest of the company's 23 power-generating facilities, reported releasing 203 pounds of chemicals, including arsenic, barium, chromium and cobalt, into the Monongahela River in 2002. It released another 299,237 pounds of chemicals on land in coal ash landfills.

The Fort Martin power plant in Maidsville, W.Va., has a 1,107 megawatt generating capacity, and reported releasing 1,232 pounds of chemicals into the Monongahela in 2002, the latest year of federal Toxic Release Inventory data publicly available and cited in the study. It disposed of approximately 55,500 pounds of toxic chemicals in the unlined coal ash landfill it has used since 1982.

In October, Citizens for Pennsylvania's Future, a statewide environmental organization, filed legal notice that it intends to sue Allegheny Energy for violating its smoke and soot control limits at Hatfield's Ferry on 1,635 days from the beginning of 1999 to the end of 2003.