Times series wins environmental reporting prize

Three journalists from The Seattle Times have won the 2009 James V. Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism for a series about heavy logging and its impacts in Western Washington.

Reporters Hal Bernton and Justin Mayo and photojournalist Steve Ringman received the $5,000 winning prize for "Logging and Landslides: What Went Wrong," published in July 2008.

Using software to map the impacts of clear-cutting by the timber company Weyerhaeuser, they found that such massive removal of trees in one harvest region accounted for one-third of landslides there.

The project "stood out for its ambition, its persistence and its compelling conclusions," one judge wrote. "The combination of computer-assisted reporting and strong interviews offered a template that should be used for journalists covering timber controversies and other land use debates across the West."

Another Washington state reporter, Leah Beth Ward of the Yakima Herald-Republic, was recognized with a special citation for her series "Hidden Wells, Dirty Water" published in October 2008. Her series showed that as many as 30,000 people in the Lower Yakima Valley drink from nitrate-polluted wells. She found that the tainted water, used by many Latino farmworkers, resulted from years of neglect by public-health agencies.

The Risser Prize, sponsored by the Knight Fellowships program and the Bill Lane Center for the American West, gives recognition to stories focusing on environmental issues in western regions of Canada, Mexico and the United States.

Information in this article, originally published September 8, 2009, was corrected September 11, 2009. A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Leah Beth Ward showed that more than 30,000 people in the Lower Yakima Valley drink from nitrate-polluted wells. It should state, Leah Beth Ward showed that as many as 30,000 people in the Lower Yakima Valley drink from nitrate-polluted wells.