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Our story in Mother Jones magazine last year, "Lead Astray," won second place in the Society of Environmental Journalists' top prize competition this year.
The story placed second in the prestigious Kevin Carmody Award for Outstanding Investigative Reporting category. This is SEJ's top prize for print journalism.
The judges said: "This well-documented and well-written piece explored the atrocious environmental record of the Doe Run Co.’s lead smelters in the United States and Peru. The authors dramatically illustrated how offshoring allows companies to escape government oversight and make a profit at the same time – in this case with a terrible cost to the health of workers and neighbors of Doe Run’s smelters."
SEJ officials revealed the winners and honored the finalists honored Sept. 5 at a gala ceremony in the Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center on the campus of Stanford University in California, on the first day of SEJ’s 17th annual conference.
Sara attended the conference, along with hundreds of other environmental journalists, scientists and leaders in the field.Posted on: 2007-09-05
Sara's story, "Lead Astray," published in the November/December 2007 issue of Mother Jones, has won an international journalism award from the Inter American Press Association. The story won in the category of "in-depth reporting" and carries a $2,000 award. Twelve prizes will be awarded in Miami in October. Click here for a link to the press release.
Posted on: 2007-07-25
My book, City Adrift: New Orleans Before and After Katrina, is available on Amazon.com.
Posted on: 2007-07-12
Posted on: 2007-07-09
BG journalist to sign copies of book on Katrina
By RACHEL ADAMS, The Daily News, radams@bgdailynews.com
Nearly everywhere local freelance journalist Sara Shipley Hiles turned during her springtime visit, devastation loomed.
The end of August marks the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, yet a large section of New Orleans still stands empty. The Lower Ninth Ward is without electricity. Families still live in Federal Emergency Management Association trailers, afraid to rebuild because the OK to do so hasn’t yet been handed down.
It was a heartbreaking sight for the former New Orleans resident, but even more heartbreaking because hardly anything had changed since she traveled there a year earlier, in April 2006, on a mission from the Center for Public Integrity. The nonprofit organization, which funds independent investigative journalism projects, recruited Hiles and six other journalists for “City Adrift: New Orleans Before and After Katrina,” a recently published book that details how the residents of New Orleans were shortchanged by many factors, including the government, technology and even the environment around them.
“In the case of Katrina, it just seemed that a lot of people were being hurt badly and some of them died because of human failures,” Hiles said. “It didn’t have to happen the way that it happened.”
A reading, discussion and signing of the book is scheduled for 4 p.m. today at Barnes & Noble Booksellers.
Hiles, a seasoned environmental journalist, penned Chapter Two, “The Environment.” During her nine-day trip in 2006, she interviewed residents, Army Corps of Engineers representatives and environmental experts, and visited the areas most devastated by the storm.
During the visit to the most ravaged areas of the city, Hiles was “depressed at the depth of ineptitude and the lack of good faith on the part of a lot of these agencies that had responsibilities and really didn’t carry them out.” Everything was in disarray, the once-vibrant city silent and covered with trash.
“You could go for miles without seeing a gas station open,” she said.
About 20 percent of the city suffered only wind damage – The French Quarter, downtown, the business district, the Garden District – but “the other 80 percent of the city was just utterly destroyed,” Hiles said. “It’s so hard to fathom until you see it for yourself.”
It’s unfortunate that the poorest neighborhoods – those built atop landfills and swampland, behind the levee that failed when Katrina hit – were the hardest hit as more than 100 billion gallons of floodwater buried the city, Hiles said. While residents there have a right to return to their homes, they’ll still be living in the shadow of levees that she said the Army Corps of Engineers divides into two categories: Those that have failed, and those that will fail.
“That’s unfortunately the conclusion – it will happen again, and more people will die,” she said.
Environmentally speaking, New Orleans has four strikes against it, Hiles said. First, the very foundation of New Orleans is sinking, and “it’s going to continue to sink because that’s how nature works,” she said. Furthermore, under the weight of the sediment deposited by the Mississippi River, the crust of the gulf is slowly sliding into the Gulf of Mexico. Wetlands are rapidly eroding; large-scale efforts have been made to save what Hiles called “a speed bump” for hurricanes, but the problem is so severe that even the largest effort only affected 5 percent of the wetlands. Finally, she says global warming is both heating the world’s natural water sources, which will cause them to expand and rise – even as New Orleans continues sinking – and affecting the intensity of storms that will continue to exacerbate all those issues.
“When you add those four things together, to me the picture is actually very bleak,” she said. “I hate that because I love New Orleans and I wish it wasn’t so.”
A Missouri native, the 35-year-old Hiles fell in love with New Orleans when she attended Loyola University to earn a communications degree. She worked at New Orleans’ Times-Picayune newspaper for six years before her career led her to Oregon; Bowling Green, where she worked at the Louisville Courier-Journal’s now-defunct Bowling Green bureau; and St. Louis. She returned to Bowling Green in June 2005 to get married, and now writes freelance and teaches part-time at Western Kentucky University.
Having a newspaper byline is one thing, Hiles said, but seeing her name on the cover of a book is so much better.
“This is an even bigger thrill because this feels more permanent than a newspaper article,” she said. “I hope to do more books someday – I’m not sure about what exactly.”
She’s working on a new Center for Public Integrity project about coal mining and its environmental effects, as well as traveling to promote “City Adrift.” The book was released at the perfect time, she said, as hurricane season began anew June 1.
“It’s an important time to be thinking about New Orleans and what we have learned, if anything,” she said. “I’m concerned we haven’t learned a whole lot.”
— Visit Sara Shipley Hiles online at www.sarashipleyhiles.com.
Posted on: 2007-06-09
Sara will read from and sign copies of her new book, "City Adrift: New Orleans Before and After Katrina," at the Barnes & Noble in Bowling Green, Ky. at 4 p.m. on Saturday, June 9.
Hurricane season starts June 1, and New Orleans has still not recovered from Katrina. Whole neighborhoods lie in ruins almost two years later, and the levee system is barely improved. Already below sea level, the city continues to sink, and the coastal wetlands continue to disappear. It's a good time to ask: What has changed?
For more information on the book from the publisher, LSU Press, click here.
Barnes & Noble is located at 1680 Campbell Lane, Bowling Green, KY 42104.
Posted on: 2007-05-24
Posted on: 2007-05-08
My book is now in print! City Adrift: New Orleans Before and After Katrina, will be officially released June 1 by LSU Press, but you can get a copy now by ordering the book here. I'm one of seven investigative journalists commissioned by the Center for Public Integrity to write the book. Here's a partial blurb from LSU Press's website:
"Hurricane Katrina was a stunning example of complete civic breakdown. Beginning on August 29, 2005, the world watched in horror as—despite all the warnings and studies—every system that might have protected New Orleans failed. Levees and canals buckled, pouring more than 100 billion gallons of floodwater into the city. Botched communications crippled rescue operations. Buses that might have evacuated thousands never came. Hospitals lost power and patients lay suffering in darkness and stifling heat. At least 1,400 Louisianans died in Hurricane Katrina, more than half of them from New Orleans, and hundreds of thousands more were displaced, many still wondering if they will ever be able to return. How could all of this have happened in twenty-first-century America? And could it all happen again?
To answer these questions, the Center for Public Integrity commissioned seven seasoned journalists to travel to New Orleans and investigate the storm’s aftermath. In City Adrift: New Orleans Before and After Katrina, they present their findings.
Comprehensive and balanced, City Adrift provides not only an assessment of what went wrong in the Big Easy during and after Hurricane Katrina, but also, more importantly, a roadmap of what must be done to ensure that such a devastating tragedy is never repeated.
“This book documents, with clarity and cogency, how virtually every agency and institution, public and private, failed a city when the threatened ‘big storm’ finally struck.”—John Seigenthaler, founder of the First Amendment Center and former editor and publisher of the Nashville Tennessean
“City Adrift is the most disturbing and engrossing book on the heartbreaking entrance of Hurricane Katrina into our nation’s mythology. The reporting is infuriating and devastating in its power and terrible accuracy. The disaster did not have to happen, and this book provides further proof that the winds of Katrina will refuse to die down in our lifetime.”—Pat Conroy
Posted on: 2007-04-27
Posted on: 2006-12-21
Mother Jones Radio host Angie Coiro interviewed Sara and her co-author, Marina Walker Guevara, about their story in Mother Jones magazine on two towns poisoned by lead smelting operations. The interview segment will air Sunday, Dec. 3 on about 50 radio stations nationwide that are part of the Air America network.
Posted on: 2006-11-30
Ed "Flash" Ferenc, host of "America's Work Force" on WKTX 830 AM radio in Cleveland, Ohio, interviewed Sara about her story in the November/December issue of Mother Jones magazine. The live interview aired during the morning drive-time talk show on Nov. 28.
Posted on: 2006-11-28
My latest story, "Lead Astray," appears in the November/December 2006 edition of Mother Jones magazine.
Posted on: 2006-10-26