Judges’ comments: Amazing stuff. The amount of work that went into this is commendable in these days of shrinking newsrooms. Top-quality journalism. We were impressed by the ambition and great commitment of the two news organizations to revealing major flaws in enforcement of the Clean Air Act and their human costs.
List date(s) this work was published or aired.
Nov. 7-Dec. 22, 2011
See this entry.
Provide a brief synopsis of the story or stories, including any significant findings.
Across America, toxic air pollution continues to punish communities 21 years after Congress amended the Clean Air Act in a push to curb the most hazardous of releases. Yet until The Center for Public Integrity–NPR investigative report – entitled “Poisoned Places” – the full extent of that harm was a closely guarded secret within the Environmental Protection Agency. The most in-depth report published on the Clean Air Act, the series exposed the regulatory failures that cause millions of Americans to continue breathing unsafe air. “Poisoned Places” publicly revealed the EPA’s internal “watch list” of the nation’s most troublesome air polluters – some 400 facilities from Texas to Iowa, New York, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana. These refineries, steel mills, incinerators, cement kilns and pharmaceutical plants polluted communities with solvents that cause cancer, metals that cause brain damage. Until our series only the EPA had seen the list. Not the communities. Not the facilities. We also disclosed how rarely the EPA uses its biggest hammer in dealing with air polluters: criminal prosecution. Decades after Congress directed the EPA to focus on nearly 200 hazardous air pollutants, just five air toxics criminal cases have led to penalties, “Poisoned Places” reported. The series triggered immediate enforcement action in two states, a push for openness by the EPA, and an avalanche of coverage across the U.S. “This report has been so powerful to grassroots people across the country,” Love Canal activist Lois Gibbs, executive director of the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, said during an OMB Watch panel discussion. “All across the country our phones have been ringing. Our email has been buzzing.” “It’s investigative reporting that we don’t see so much anymore.”
Explain types of documents, data or Internet resources used. Were FOI or public records act requests required? How did this affect the work?
The most difficult obstacle was understanding and accounting for the many caveats of EPA data. The RSEI model, for example, is a very valuable tool, but results must be used with caution because of the underlying assumptions of the model. The enforcement data (ECHO) provide valuable information on actions taken against individual facilities, but are often incomplete. Emissions data from the TRI are meant to inform citizens of the pollutants around them, but they are often underreported. Getting the various databases to work in concert was also a challenge. Each uses a different facility identification system, for example, and the crosswalks that match them are not complete. Analysis of these databases pointed to nationwide trends, helped identify areas to examine more closely and led to individual cases to highlight. We conducted an intensive analysis of RSEI in an attempt to find “toxic hot spots.” We looked at nationwide emissions totals in TRI. And we evaluated regulators’ enforcement actions and attempts to address “high-priority violations” using ECHO. Knowing the potential problems with the data, we spent considerable time assessing the reliability of what we were seeing and confirming our findings. We talked with EPA officials in charge of operating each database. We talked with researchers who use the data regularly. We talked with the EPA official who created RSEI and is now retired. And we confirmed much of what the analysis showed with state and local officials and company representatives. We made extensive use of the EPA’s Enforcement Compliance History Online (ECHO) database as well as the Toxics Release Inventory. We also used PACER and Courthousenews.com to search for litigation. FOIA benefited us greatly on a number of fronts: • We were the first media outlet ever to obtain and publish the EPA’s internal “watch list” of the most worrisome polluters nationwide, some 400 facilities. We obtained the government’s list through FOIA. • We used FOIA to obtain records revealing the Department of Justice’s prosecution of environmental crimes. This data, never analyzed in this depth, revealed that Clean Air Act cases brought the lowest level of fines and punishment of any environmental crimes. • We obtained, through FOIA, EPA’s Risk Screening Environmental Indicators model, which contained more than a billion records and provided detailed data about potential risks posed to communities by toxic air emissions. The EPA makes some of its Air Facility System data — outlining how facilities are complying with the Clean Air Act — available online, but we used FOIA to get a detailed subset showing what actions regulators had taken to address “high priority violators.” Each story focusing on an individual community benefited from records obtained through state open records requests. For the story on Muscatine, Iowa, for example, we reviewed memos, reports, data and thousands of emails from the state regulatory agency. We posted many of them online, including some with annotation in an application using DocumentCloud.
Explain types of human sources used.
Our journalists told this story through the eyes of people in pollution hot spots across the country, traveling to 10 states and visiting more than a dozen communities battling big industry and, often, compliant regulators. We visited middle-class suburbs, Bible belt patches and urban corridors. We witnessed the carbon black in Oklahoma, the pungent haze in Iowa, the toxic metals in Arizona. We witnessed residents of a historically black neighborhood in Shreveport, Louisiana, test the air outside a refinery with specially equipped buckets on a sticky July 4th weekend. Regulators, the people said, weren’t protecting them.
Results (if any).
The series triggered immediate enforcement action in two states, a push for openness by the EPA, and an avalanche of coverage across the U.S. Dozens of media outlets — from WEKU in Eastern Kentucky to the Tucson Sentinel to The Los Angeles Times — produced their own stories using our data or aired segments of the CPI-NPR project. That coverage touched millions of readers, bringing unprecedented attention to Clean Air Act issues. Days after “Poisoned Places” was published, enforcement actions were taken in Arizona and Iowa, and the EPA began posting monthly online updates of its watch list for the public to see. The true scope of the nation’s battle with air toxics is, now, no longer a secret.
Follow-up (if any). Have you run a correction or clarification on the report or has anyone come forward to challenge its accuracy? If so, please explain.
No.
Advice to other journalists planning a similar story or project.
Go there. The core of our story was documents – the EPA watch list, the pollution records of refineries, chemical plants and coal-fired power plants, lawsuits and enforcement actions. Yet the heart was the people in communities from Ponca City, Oklahoma, to Muscatine, Iowa, to Hayden, Arizona. These were little-noticed communities choking on unclean air, and we told their stories with depth and detail. The combination of hard data, deep analysis and ground-floor reporting produced a project of unmatched depth.