Lisa Sorg is a co-winner of the National Press Foundation Thomas L. Stokes Award for Best Energy and Environment Writing.

Sorg’s work, titled “Clear and Present Danger” told “an exasperating story” about the U.S. military’s failure, despite spending $2 million, to clean up the hazardous legacy of an abandoned Nike missile plant that has polluted a Black and Latino neighborhood in Burlington, North Carolina for more than three decades. Sorg called it a story of “incompetence, indifference and inertia.”

Sorg’s story appeared on the nonprofit NC Policy Watch website, was reprinted in the Burlington Times-News, and has sparked remedial action.