An official website of the United States government.

This is not the current EPA website. To navigate to the current EPA website, please go to www.epa.gov. This website is historical material reflecting the EPA website as it existed on January 19, 2021. This website is no longer updated and links to external websites and some internal pages may not work. More information »

Facility Registry Service (FRS) Best Practices

On this page:

Locating a Facility

1. The location of a facility should be where the facility or site is physically located.  The address should never be a P.O. Box, headquarters, or administrative office. The URISA Address Standard is a useful resource and commonly accepted address standard.

2. If a facility does not have a verified Lat/Long, and you provide a street address, geo-coding will automatically be triggered in the next refresh.  For this reason it is recommended as a best practice that you verify the Lat/Long of any such location.

3. When encountering physical locations that are provided as Public Land Survey System (PLSS) Descriptions of Township/Section/Range, it is recommended that users refer to the instructions found in the PLSS Guide.  

Top of Page


Visual Verification

  1. If a facility does not appear to have a location, it can be found using online maps such as google or bing.  The location can be found by clicking on the approximate location and letting the map return associated data. Lat/long data should follow the standard provided below
  2. Some facilities may show a lat/long value in the "address" field.  In these instances the value is probably in WGS84 coordinate system since that is a common default for GPS units and online mapping tools like Google Maps and Bing Maps.  Please be aware of this when choosing your coordinate system in the FLA.
  3. For facilities which may be flagged for invalid or anomalous city or ZIP, a search against the USPS site can help to resolve those anomalies.  For example it can show acceptable city names associated with a ZIP code.

Top of Page


Working with Facility Names: Tips for making corrections and updates to facility names

  1. A Facility name should at a minimum describe what a facility is, not who owns it, or the administrative office where reports are filed.
     
    Do Don't Do
    GE Manufacturing Plant General Electric Inc.
  2. City names are usually only used when describing a municipal building.
     
    Do Don't Do
    Haverhill Wastewater Treatment Plant Haverhill Wal-Mart of Cleveland
  3. You will see many programs who are concerned with only one aspect of a facility, for example OIL may characterize a power plant as a fuel storage tank, when the fuel tank is actually just supporting infrastructure for the primary interest, that being the power plant. Try to find a name for the facility as a whole, that the company itself would use.
     
    Do Don't Do
    AEP KAMMER / MITCHELL POWER PLANT AEP KAMMER OIL TANK

Top of Page


Miscellaneous Tips

Industrial Classification

NAICS information cannot be changed in the FLA.  It is recommended that you contact the program of record.   Users may query FRS by NAICS code and since a facility can be categorized by more than one NAICS Code, the facility, latitude, and longitude information will be repeated for each NAICS Code.

Contact and Ownership Information

  1. Contact and ownership information cannot be changed in the FLA.  It is recommended that you contact the program of record.
  2. Sometimes Googling a contact phone can help verify if a facility with more than one name and more than one contact is the same facility.

Top of Page