By Sonni Efron
Yanick Rice Lamb, a professor of journalism at Howard University, and Lisa Sorg, an environmental reporter at NC Policy Watch, have won the National Press Foundation’s Thomas L. Stokes Award for Best Energy and Environment Writing for stories exposing the long-term health effects of unaddressed contamination on nearby neighborhoods of color.
NPF judges noted that both stories were the work of a single reporter at a small news outlet who dug and then dug deeper to tell a sprawling story that spanned decades.
Rice journeyed back to her hometown of Akron, Ohio, 
to chronicle the consequences of a botched Superfund cleanup after the rubber industry and others dumped a toxic stew of nearly 100 deadly contaminants, including neurotoxins, endocrine disruptors and compounds that can damaged the liver and immune system.
Her two stories, about the rubber industry’s toxic legacy in Akron and the decades-long fight over the superfund site in Uniontown were published in Belt Magazine in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity.
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.
“She followed the money, uncovered government failure at every level, and she also got the human story,” judge Debbie Elliott of NPR said, calling the work “a fascinating piece of accountability journalism.”
Judges praised Rice’s piece as a powerful and effective tale of the long-term health consequences of the dumping, which included an EPA record of nearly 100 cases of sickness and disease in the neighborhood near the landfill.
Judges awarded an honorable mention to Evan Halper of the Los Angeles Times for a story on the damaging environmental effects of extracting and processing lithium and other materials needed for California’s electric car market. The story was one of a larger project titled “The United States of California” on the state’s outsized role in incubating new ideas, technologies and environmental regulations for the nation. Halper has since moved to The Washington Post.
The Thomas L. Stokes Award was established in the spring of 1959 by friends and admirers of the late Thomas L. Stokes, a syndicated Washington columnist on national affairs. It is given annually for the best reporting “in the independent spirit of Tom Stokes” on subjects of interest to him including energy, natural resources and the environment.
Judges for the award were Tom Davidson of Gannett, Debbie Elliott of National Public Radio, Ronnie Greene of Thomson Reuters and Rod Kuckro of Twin Matrix.
