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Yet in recent years, government funding for the critical devices has become as fickle and unpredictable as the waters themselves.
Losing the equipment leaves forecasters in the dark, unable to put out advance warnings to those who could be in harm’s way.
The federal government does not require U.S. railroads to have comprehensive plans for a worst-case oil disasters, according to the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting.
That means no one knows if the railways that carried 4.2 million barrels of crude oil through the state last year are prepared for a catastrophe.
A handful of factors – including a declining number of volunteer firefighter/first-responders and a lack of information – complicate planning efforts in rural states like Maine.
Read the story here.
Reporting on hazardous materials?
Get data from NICAR's recently updated hazardous materials database.
Listen to tips on covering hazmat pollution and using the NICAR database.
Dan Keating of the Washington Post used the CDC Wonder database to explore the racial breakdowns of gun deaths. What he found challenges the idea of having a gun for protection — at least for some.
"A white person is five times as likely to commit suicide with a gun as to be shot with a gun; for each African American who uses a gun to commit suicide, five are killed by other people with guns."
Learn how to use the same CDC data to investigate causes of death in your area.
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It’s like a gold rush. There’s money to be made, but the cost of those riches is a host of harmful, unintended consequences.
A recent Indianapolis Star investigation uncovered evidence linking lucrative deer farming operations to the spread of invasive lice and diseases such as bovine tuberculosis and chronic wasting disease in wild deer populations. The detailed story, told in five chapters each accompanied by a video, chronicles the rise of commercial deer farming from one Amish farmer with pet deer to the profitable industry that exists today.
“No one really saw this coming,” said Indianapolis Star star reporter Ryan Sabalow.
Sabalow, a long-time hunter, became interested in writing about deer farming after a 2012 press release from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources advised hunters to kill deer with yellow tags in their ears because they could have chronic wasting disease.
Sabalow later learned that the escaped deer that triggered the press release was known as “Yellow 47.” The deer had escaped from an Indiana farm after it was shipped from a site in Pennsylvania that was known to have had deer infected with chronic wasting disease.
Still, Sabalow wasn’t sure of the prevalence of chronic wasting disease, or of the exact nature of its relationship to the deer farming industry. Then he saw the size of the antlers on the deer that farmers were raising across the country. He knew he had something.
The male deer favored by breeders — called “nontypical” bucks due to their large antlers — have impressive racks. In the wild, such deer are rare and highly sought after by hunters.
“We knew there was an interesting business story with possibly with some watchdog elements,” Sabalow said.
So he went to a deer breeder conference in Cincinnati. The event showed him how much money was involved in the industry. (Sabalow went on to feature a particularly famous nontypical buck named “X-Factor” in his story. X-Factor’s estimated worth is about $500,000. His semen sells for $2,500 a unit.)
Sabalow’s next step was to file public records requests in every state asking for documents that would identify the locations of deer farms and high-fence hunting preserves, the number of animals at each facility, and the dates the animals were licensed. He kept track of the requests in a spreadsheet, though many were never filled and some states didn’t respond to his requests at all.
The requests were helpful to the story, Sabalow said, but not in the way he initially expected. While Sabalow got enough data to map the occurrences of disease in wild deer populations, the requests also demonstrated lax federal regulation of the deer farming industry.
One set of records that Sabalow tried particularly hard to get from the USDA dealt with bovine tuberculosis and chronic wasting disease across the country. The USDA told him it didn't have have a database of this information.
“They eventually provided us with disease test results that were a couple years old,” Sabalow said. “You would hope that federal disease trackers would know where diseases happen.”
Case files Sabalow received from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service law enforcement division were so heavily redacted that they became difficult to read.
After spending a lot of time making phone calls and sending emails to follow up on his state records requests, Sabalow eventually decided it would be more worthwhile to get information from other sources.
He ended up relying on a 2007 industry study done by Texas A&M University as well as information from state wildlife agencies. Their findings made a persuasive case that disease in wild populations had originally come from farm-raised deer.
Sabalow also used interviews with those in the industry to get a sense of what was going on.
“It’s interviews that make the story,” he said.
Because he's a hunter and interested in the topic himself, Sabalow said he didn’t have much difficulty getting people to talk to him. Sources understood he wasn’t interested in parachuting in and quickly moving on to the next story, he said.
“We really went out of our way to encourage people to talk to us.”
Avoiding “he said, she said” reporting is key when covering these kinds of issues, he said. As he reported “Buck Fever,” Sabalow continued to circle back to the evidence he'd gathered.
“Eighteen months of reporting allowed us to make declarative statements,” Sabalow said, “The story was fair, but the evidence showed what it showed.”
The online edition of the story was published in five chapters, each accompanied by videos. The chapters helped to give the story narrative flow, Sabalow said, since they released the online version of the story all at once.
“If you only read the print edition, then I think you wouldn’t see the whole story,” Sabalow said. “We spent so much time with these folks.”
Sabalow hopes his story can help start a national discussion about the risks and rewards of deer farming.
“It sure would be nice to have a federal conversation about whether this, as a society, is something that we value, whether the trophy industry is worth it,” Sabalow said.
Follow Indianapolis Star reporter Ryan Sabalow on Twitter @RyanSabalow.
The city of Tupelo, Miss. violated open-records laws by not providing the Daily Journal with text messages it requested last year.
The paper had requested the texts from the mayor's personal cell phone over the course of three days last October, when a city official resigned, the Journal wrote.
The Mississippi Ethics Commission all agreed that the mayor's texts were considered open records under state open records laws.
"'Any text message used by a city official in the conduct, transaction or performance of any business, transaction, work, duty or function of (the city), or required to be maintained by (the city) is a public record subject to the Act, regardless of where the record is stored,' the commission wrote in the advisory opinion," according to the Journal.
The mayor was surprised, the Journal reported, but is going to try to make a "digital records policy" for the city.
Yet another university community has been accused of denying justice to a female sexual assault victim in order to protect a star male athlete. The New York Times today chronicled the shortcomings of an investigation by Tallahassee police into a reported sexual assault in which Florida State University quarterback Jameis Winston was the alleged assailant.
Police failed to conduct a proper investigation when the incident was reported, the Times found. Even after the accuser identified her attacker to the police, Winston was never interviewed and DNA evidence was not collected. By the time prosecutors began to investigate 11 months later, the trail had gone cold.
The university also failed to conduct any investigation of its own into the incident, though there is evidence that the athletics department was aware that there was an open police investigation.
Read the story here.
Tasked with reporting on mental health? Take a few minutes to listen to tips from Meg Kissinger of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Kissinger attended a recent Watchdog Workshop to talk about her series of award-winning stories investigating caregivers.
"We found people living in squalor," Kissinger said. "It really upset people." So how did she find them? She talked to people who had seen the worst of the worst. Listen to her explain the process:
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United States Senate candidate and state senator Joni Ernst has cited her National Guard duty to rebuff criticism for missing more than half of the votes in the Iowa Senate this year.
In a WHO-TV interview posted on April 7, the Red Oak Republican acknowledged that National Guard service wasn’t the only reason she’s missed votes, but she said that only “a few of those votes were due to other activities.”
However, a review by The Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA) shows very little overlap between Iowa Senate votes and her National Guard service.
Read the story here.
Several members of Investigative Reporters and Editors were among journalists recognized in the 2014 Pulitzer Prizes on Monday.
The Washington Post and The Guardian US won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their work exposing secret surveillance by the National Security Agency. Several IRE members contributed to the reporting.
Chris Hamby of The Center for Public Integrity won for Investigative Reporting for “his reports on how some lawyers and doctors rigged a system to deny benefits to coal miners stricken with black lung disease, resulting in remedial legislative efforts.”
Will Hobson and Michael LaForgia of the Tampa Bay Times won for Local Reporting for “their relentless investigation into the squalid conditions that marked housing for the city’s substantial homeless population, leading to swift reforms.”
David Philipps of The Gazette (Colorado Springs, CO) won for National Reporting for "expanding the examination of how wounded combat veterans are mistreated, focusing on loss of benefits for life after discharge by the Army for minor offenses, stories augmented with digital tools and stirring congressional action."
Several IRE members were among Pulitzer Prize finalists as well.
Megan Twohey of Reuters was a finalist for the prize in Investigative Reporting for her reporting on underground Internet child exchanges.
Phillip Reese of The Sacramento Bee also was a finalist for the Investigative Reporting prize for his reporting on a Las Vegas mental hospital that dumped more than 1,500 psychiatric patients across the country over a span of five years.
Les Zaitz of The Oregonian was a finalist in the Explanatory Reporting category for his narratives that showed how lethal Mexican drug cartels infiltrated Oregon and other regions of the country.
Todd South was part of a team from the Chattanooga Times Free Press that was a finalist for the Local Reporting prize. South and his colleagues were recognized “for using an array of journalistic tools to explore the ‘no-snitch’ culture that helps perpetuate a cycle of violence in one of the most dangerous cities in the South.”
John Emshwiller and Jeremy Singer-Vine of The Wall Street Journal were finalists for National Reporting for “their reports and searchable database on the nation’s often overlooked factories and research centers that once produced nuclear weapons and now pose contamination risks.”
Newsday was named as the sole finalist for the Public Service prize for their series on exposing "shootings, beatings and other concealed misconduct by some Long Island police officers..." Several IRE members contributed to the reporting.
View the entire list of 2014 Pulitizer Prize winners here.
Officials with the Metropolitan Entertainment and Convention Authority say the access is crucial for board members, who need to know the ins and outs of business at the CenturyLink Center and TD Ameritrade Park.
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