Category: Water quality

IRW and WWNO/WRKF analyzed U.S. Geological Survey Groundwater Data for Louisiana to determine the extent to which water levels have declined over time in the state’s public and private wells.

Over the course of 2020, the Investigative Reporting Workshop produced 20 investigations into subject areas we’ve focused on since we began publishing 11 years ago: Banking, immigration, health and the environment.

The stories IRW published in 2020 on water problems in Florida and California  illuminate some of the many water issues prevalent in the country today.

One of the hallmarks of investigative journalism is giving people information they need before they know they need it. That’s how IRW’s drinking water project began taking shape back in 2014, when problems in the nation’s drinking water systems started cropping up.

California communities fight — sometimes, with their neighbors — for clean, safe drinking water.

Documentarians Casey Beck and Mary Cardaras created “The Great Divide,” the story of one community’s fight for clean water in California, the first state to declare clean water a human right.

The state of Florida has passed laws and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on water treatment projects to try to reduce the phosphorus flowing into the lake. But it continues unabated, according to a review of state water-monitoring data by Weather.com and the Investigative Reporting Workshop.

While the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs has been regulating pollution running off farms, not a single enforcement action has been taken against a farmer or rancher. Here’s how they kept it that way.