The National Press Foundation announced Friday that Public Health Watch had won the 2023 Thomas L. Stokes Award for Best Energy and Environment Writing.
PHW journalists David Leffler, Savanna Strott, Salina Arredondo, Jana Cholakovska, Jim Morris, Nazmul Ahasan and Susan White were honored for “Toxic Texas Air,” an investigative series revealing, among other things, that state environmental regulators knew about but failed to stop high benzene emissions in the majority-Latino community of Channelview, Texas, for nearly two decades.
National Press Foundation judges called the series “heroic” and “an exemplar of exactly the kind of impact local journalism can have.” In response to the Channelview story, a state senator promised to draft legislation that would hold the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to account. PHW will release an investigative podcast on Channelview, “Fumed,” this summer.
Earlier this week, “Toxic Texas Air” was awarded second place in the Best of the West contest, in the category of growth and environmental reporting.
“This investigation is persistent as it is thorough, coming up with damning revelations months apart,” the contest judge wrote. “The writing is vivid and accessible, and the sourcing shows a deep connection to the community as well as a dogged pursuit of what is hidden from it. The many explainers, features and sidebars are remarkably thorough. Meaningfully, the reporting is also clearly helping to inform actions to better protect the community from pollution’s harms.”
As of this date, “Toxic Texas Air” and another PHW project, “The Holdouts,” a look at the public health implications of the failure by Texas and nine other states to expand Medicaid, have won six national and regional awards. More on the earlier awards can be found here.