By Anthony DeBarros
USA TODAY

In April, after USA TODAY published its Ghost Factories investigation into forgotten lead smelters, we heard from several people who wanted to know more about how the project came together — particularly the online package that included details on more than 230 of the former factories.

The following is an expanded version of a post I originally sent to IRE’s NICAR-L mailing list:

Alison Young was the lead reporter who conceived the idea for the project. In late 2010, she came to me with a couple of PDFs showing a list of suspected lead smelter ...

(Editor's Note: This is Part 2 of our "Behind the Story" look at coverage of the Hanford nuclear reservation's environmental issues.)

Determining when an ongoing issue becomes an issue worth investigating isn’t always easy.

Craig Welch, an environmental reporter for The Seattle Times who juggles topics from oceans to forests, also keeps his eye on the Hanford nuclear reservation, which had become, as one of his stories stated, an "atomic mess after 40 years of bomb-making."  

In Welch’s investigative stories "Big cleanup questions still loom at Hanford" and "Will ...

Many investigative reporters are recreational data users, but data alone cannot be trusted.

"You can’t take what is in those databases for granted," said Kate Golden, a reporter and multimedia producer for WisconsinWatch.org. At the panel "Environmental analyses for any newsroom," she emphasized the importance of speaking with the lead agency to find out what the data actually means.

During the panel, Elizabeth Lucas a data reporter for The Center for Public Integrity and Golden highlighted a variety of investigative environmental stories such as "Despite lone inspector’s efforts, persistent haze envelops Iowa town" and "Under legal pressure ...

In "Problems plague cleanup at Hanford nuclear waste site," USA Today’s Peter Eisler takes on 56 million gallons of radioactive waste and finds he isn’t the only one who has a few things to learn. After 10 years of developing the “first-of-its-kind” nuclear waste treatment plant, the Department of Energy and its contractors still don’t know how to build it.

Project costs tripled to $12.3 billion and the start-up date was moved to 2019 from 2011, Eisler reported.

By using in-depth interviews and federal employees' documented concerns over "technical problems," Eisler was able to relay to ...

Many Texans had no idea that carcinogenic radiation was in their tap water.

For decades, the environmental agency that was supposed to protect the public from pollution had been deliberately changing radiation test data for water systems.

Not only had false data been reported to consumers, but the "lowballing" also allowed water providers to avoid breaking federal safe drinking water rules.

This all began when KHOU I-team member Keith Tomshe noticed a disclaimer on his water bill stating that small amounts of arsenic, also a carcinogen, had been found in his neighborhood’s drinking water. The disclosure is called a ...

Des Moines Register reporters Chase Davis and Perry Beeman spent months compiling and making sense of data for a series on air pollution in Iowa. But, with more than 1,600 polluting facilities across the state, there simply wasn’t space in the stories to mention any but the most noteworthy. That’s where data editor James Wilkerson and digital projects editor Michael Corey came in. They developed an interactive map that allowed users to see information about the facilities near them. "It localized the story to basically every community in Iowa," Davis said of the map. It also gave ...

Assessing the health of the nation's water is a daunting task, and the subject of an ongoing New York Times series called "Toxic Waters." It can't be done through data alone, but there is plenty of data available, particularly at the federal level. But working with it proved to be a difficult and occasionally frustrating task. Here's the story behind the database that we built for our readers.

Records describing enforcement of the Clean Water Act can be found at the federal level and among dozens of states that have authority to administer some or all of ...

The latest installment of The Associated Press’ PharmaWater investigation seemed unlikely at the initial story conference: no ready data and seemingly nothing to expose. Our national investigative team had broken the story this past year that tens of millions of Americans drink from water supplies that test positive for trace pharmaceuticals. They cover the gamut from antibiotics to psychiatric drugs to sex hormones, mostly in the form of unmetabolized medicines excreted by people. They are found in concentrations far below medical doses, but some aquatic species already have been hurt, and research is raising questions about the effects on humans ...

Outside hundreds of schools across the country, children are exposed to air that appears to be rife with chemicals that can exacerbate asthma or cause cancer. The reporting that led us to that astounding conclusion began with a relatively straightforward question: What's in the air outside the nation's schools? To find the answer, we turned to a variety of state and federal databases that pinpoint schools, detail the chemicals released from industrial facilities and estimate the potential severity of toxic air pollution across the country. Many newspapers have dealt extensively with the government's most basic pollution information ...

Go to one of Minnesota’s many state forests, and you’re likely to see — or hear — one of the state’s fastest growing recreational activities. Ownership of all-terrain vehicles has more than tripled in the past decade in Minnesota, with 264,000 vehicles registered with the state. ATV riding is permitted in many state forests. Eventually, ATV riders will have thousands of miles of trails and forest roads to explore once state natural resource officials finish an assessment of the trail system. Five years ago there were virtually no restrictions on ATV use in 46 of 58 state forests ...