Last week the Seattle Post-Intelligencer‘s Robert McClure ran a large, three-day package on the pollution and its cleanup, or efforts in that direction, on the nearby Duwamish River. It runs through the heart of one of Seattle’s industrial zones and had become, he writes, one of the nation’s most toxic urban sites. Today, he writes, “the river has started to limp back” but the federal Superfund program to boost it on its way is hobbled by industry bosses’s resistance, bad management, and the sheer size of the job. It remains, he writes, laced with toxic timebombs.
The story’s final installment reports the fate of one of the key whistleblowers that stimulated the cleanup program. He has not had an easy time. This is old-fashioned, brawny investigative, crusading reporting. Good art, too (the photo at right is terrifically framed and evocative – even though, in all likelihood, those plumes are almost entirely condensed steam and, one can easily imagine, hardly toxic at all).
-CP
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