Located on the shores of the Puget Sound, our newsroom has a front-row seat to our region's primary water body. We watch the ferries, kids playing on the beaches, fishermen tromping out to the piers. But when colleague Robert McClure and I were charged with evaluating the health of the sound, we had to figure out how to check its vital signs. We looked at different indicators: pollution - its sources past, present, and future; populations of fish and other marine life; and contamination in seafood.
Lise Olsen, then the computer-assisted reporting specialist at the newspaper, and I sifted through state and federal databases to identify who was still harming the sound and checked whether regulators adequately protected the public and environment. The results were surprising. We used databases of cleanup sites to identify old polluters and places where contaminants could be leaching from tainted sediment.
Some of those locations had been placed under the federal Superfund program, others under state regulation. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a searchable site for some federal cleanups (www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/npl/locate.htm), but that didn't provide the data we needed for our analysis. For that, we went again to the Ecology Department. We downloaded from its Web site an Excel file called the Confirmed and Suspected Contaminated Sites (CSCS) Report.
It had loads of information including what the pollutant was; if it was in the land, air or water; the progress of the cleanup and, roughly, how long the contamination had been known about. We found that the pollution was getting better overall and that the main backsliding came from pollution associated with cars, not industry. These results led us in search of the pollution sources - where did this stuff come from, and was it still pouring in?
We examined current contamination sources and permits data, trying to learn how many square miles of contamination existed and what was in the water. After figuring out what we could about pollution in the environment and where it was coming from, we wanted to know what that meant for the critters soaking in it, plus the people eating the local seafood. As for support, both Microsoft and Red Hat charge for it.