Want to know if a business, school or some other facility in your neighborhood has been caught polluting a stream or the ground water in recent years?  Check out this interactive graphic from the New York Times.

Drawing on pollution violation data kept by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the newspaper concludes that the system set up by the 1972 Clean Water Act to protect our streams and drinking water isn't working all that well.

In Maryland, for instance, it would appear that most of the 2,691 regulated facilities have violated the Clean Water Act at least once, often multiple times. Relatively few have been fined - though I suspect that many of these are what environmental officials would call "paper" violations, including failure to submit the required reports on time.

The Maryland Department of the Environment responded to the newspaper's data with a statement saying it "places a high priority on enforcing environmental laws." You can read the full text here. In a separate graphic, the NYT did indicate that Maryland took action against a greater share of its major violators than many other states, about 36 out of 100 violations being subject to enforcement. 

This is part of an occasional "Toxic Waters" series the Times has been doing on water pollution problems across the United States. Other installments looked at drinking water contaminated by the popular weed-killer atrazine and at polluted runoff from large-scale livestock farms.