The "Poisoned workers & poisoned places" series wasn't planned as a CAR project. With no databases to draw from, this story was supposed to be pure shoe-leather, an old-fashioned document dig through dusty archives spread across the country. It took all of a month before we turned to the computer. The series revealed that the U.S. government secretly hired more than 300 private companies during the 1940s and '50s to process thousands of tons of radioactive and toxic material for use in nuclear weapons. From small machine shops to big chemical plants, commercial manufacturing facilities across the nation were quietly converted to the risky job of handling uranium, thorium, polonium, beryllium and other dangerous material.
The newspaper showed that the government regularly documented severe health risks for employees at the contracting sites, but those studies were kept secret, leaving thousands of workers unaware of their increased odds for cancer and other illnesses. The contracting operations also contaminated the air, soil and water in dozens of communities, pumping out radioactive and toxic waste with little regard for the safety of neighboring residents.
The role that CAR played in this story illustrates the assistance computers can provide on a big project, even when there's no real database analysis involved. We used the computer less as a reporting tool than an organizational aid. But it nevertheless proved invaluable.
Virtually all of the documentation for the series came from a review of more than 100,000 pages of declassified federal records on the nuclear weapons program. They were stored in a half-dozen or so libraries and federal archives across the country, from Atlanta to Las Vegas, Chicago to Washington. Most had never been reviewed since their release by the government under a declassification program that has dumped millions of pages of files from the weapons program into the public domain over the past decade. All of them were paper records, many of them so faded that they were barely legible. There was no index. Only a tiny fraction had been organized into a few searchable databases.
Track and retrieve
Our goal was to go through all of these records, identify every company that secretly worked for the U.S. nuclear weapons program, document the type of work each firm did, and assess its impact on workers' health and the environment. With so many records to search, organizing our material in a way that would allow us to track and retrieve specific information and findings became critical. Some of the documents we found related to a single company; some included information that was pertinent to many of the contractors we were studying. Others didn't mention any companies at all, but contained general data on the health and environmental risks associated with particular operations that were being done at some of the facilities we were tracking.
Using Excel
So this was far more complicated than simply assigning a manila folder to each company and filling it up with whatever pertinent documents we happened to run across.
We decided to build an Excel spreadsheet that we could use to track the records and relate them to the applicable contractors. We set up a field for each company we identified, with additional fields for the firm's address, the type of work it did, the dates of its operation, the current use of the property, etc. We also included notes fields to list any document we found that might be relevant to the operations of each company, as well as the location of that document in our paper files. For example, the field for the Simonds Saw and Steel Co., a steel mill in Lockport, N.Y., that cut uranium metal rods used to produce nuclear weapons fuel, would include references to documents in our "Health Studies" file, our "Uranium Processes" file as well as our file on the company itself.
Glorified index
We never actually crunched any data from the spreadsheet, other than a few basic queries to identify the number of firms in a particular state. We just used it as a glorified index. But that proved critical, because we were piecing together company histories from dozens of different types of documents. We might find a contract that named a particular contractor but didn't say what sort of work the company was doing. Another record might tell us what the work was, but it wouldn't include any information on whether the government had studied radiation doses to workers at the site. Another might offer information on typical radiation levels for workers in that type of operation, but it wouldn't list the company specifically as a place doing that work. In the end, it all had to be pieced together like a maddening puzzle. The spreadsheet simply helped us keep track of all the pieces - and where they fit together - in a much more efficient way. When it came time to run our list of weapons contractors in the paper, we already had all the information we needed in the database. We simply stripped away the notes fields, wiped out whatever coding we'd entered, and we had all the information we needed in a handy format for our graphics people. And even that wasn't the end of it. After the series ran, when readers began calling to ask where they could get more information on contracting sites in their area, I could call up the database and tell them exactly what records they needed to request from the government. It was only a few weeks before I got a call from an official at the Department of Energy: He wanted a copy of the database.
Pete Eisler can be reached by e-mail at peisler@usatoday.com