ECMPS Support

A number of emissions submission remain to be received for the 2008Q4 submission period. If you are trying to submit your 2008Q4 emissions data today, you have qualified as an Eleventh Hour Submitter. No matter. Here are some tips to help you try to get that emissions data in before midnight.

1. Submit What you Can: Unlike ETS-FTP, you can submit your data in parts. If you have the monitoring plan evaluating without critical errors, go ahead and get the monitoring plan data submitted to the EPA Host System. There is no reason to wait until all of your other data are ready to submit before you do any of the submissions. (The same goes for your QA tests. If they are ready to submit, go ahead and get them submitted.)


2. Use All of the Resources Available: If you submit a technical support request today, it is unlikely that it will get answered today. You should go ahead and send in the request for technical support, but your expectation should be that it will not be addressed until after today. There are a number of other people who are ahead of you in line and priority will go to them simply because they got in ahead of you. What can you do? Use all of the resources on the ECMPS Support Web site. These include, but are not limited to:
   
   
   
   • Known Issues
   • ECMPS Support Blog
   • ECMPS Tutorials
   • Frequently Asked Questions
   • Reporting Instructions


3. Do Not Stress Over Errors Which Do Not Prevent Submission: Obviously, the goal is to submit the emissions data without critical errors. However, the only errors which prevent you from submitting your data without critical errors are critical level one errors. Critical level two, non-critical, and informational errors do not prevent you from submitting without critical errors. If you do not have critical level one errors, you are ready to submit. The other errors and informational messages can be dealt with later.


4. Submit with Critical Errors: If you cannot get an evaluation without critical level one errors, use the submit with critical errors option in the Submit Module. Your data will be submitted to the EPA Host System, and you will meet the regulatory deadline for submission. However, you will need to address the evaluation errors and submit without critical errors as soon as possible after the submission period. Data submitted with critical errors are not added to the official EPA Host System database. The data submitted with critical errors are stored simply as XML files.


5. Communicate With The EPA: If you are running into particular technical problems, let your EPA Analyst(s) know by sending them an email or calling them.


6. Email Your XML Files: If you not able to even import your data into the Client Tool, you can email your data to Laurie DeSantis. Note, this is a worst case scenario. This will meet the regulatory deadline, but you will be required to submit data without critical errors as soon as possible after the submission period.Also, if you zip up your files, be sure to rename the file extension to something that is not ".ZIP". Attachments with that extension are not delivered by the EPA mail server for security reasons. So change the extension to something like ".ZTP" in order to have your attachments sent.