Hillman Foundation

September 15, 2010

NEW YORK: The Sidney Hillman Foundation announced today that Ronnie Greene has won the August Sidney Award for a two-part (part one, part two), 5,600-word series about how a tiny Florida town of eighty families challenged the Lockheed Martin Corporation to compensate it for the devastating pollution caused by a defunct plant which manufactured parts for nuclear weapons.

The former American Beryllium Company plant in the predominantly African-American town of Tallevast in Manatee County was opened in 1961 and shuttered in 1996. Greene reported that “the plant manufactured machine parts for nuclear weapons using beryllium-containing metals. Workers inhaled hazardous dust and handled a toxic degreaser that cleaned machine parts.”

Three weeks after Greene’s stories were published in The Miami Herald, Lockheed Martin announced a tentative settlement of a five year-old lawsuit filed by residents seeking compensation from the company for depressed property values. The suit was scheduled to go to trial next month. Details of the settlement have not been made public.

Among the story’s findings:

* In January 2000, as it prepared to sell the plant it had recently purchased, Lockheed Martin discovered a leak of solvents used in those degreasers. The leaching, state officials say, could have begun 38 years earlier and, stunningly, gone undetected until then.
* They discovered an underground plume seeping 200 acres in a town of 1.5 square miles, where a number of residents still drank and showered from well water. The main hazard in that toxic cesspool was TCE, a cancer-causing chemical used in the degreaser that, five years earlier, had drawn attention in the book A Civil Action over contamination in a small Massachusetts town.
* The people of Tallevast were told nothing and discovered the news by chance more than three years later, in September 2003.
* The town has had more than 80 cancer cases over the past three decades–on average, one for every home in town.
* Today the defense contractor estimates it will take 50 years to clean the mess.

“This fine piece of investigative journalism may have provided part of the necessary pressure to force this multi-national corporation to finally reach a settlement with the struggling residents of this tiny Florida town,” said Sidney Award judge Charles Kaiser.

Ronnie Greene is the Investigations and Government editor at The Miami Herald, where he spent nine years as an investigative reporter before becoming an editor in 2007. Greene’s projects have exposed exploitation of laborers at the bottom of Florida’s agricultural industry, deadly conditions of small, under-the-radar air cargo planes, and corruption at Miami’s airport. He is author of Night Fire: Big Oil, Poison Air, And Margie Richard’s Fight To Save Her Town (HarperCollins/Amistad, 2008), a nonfiction environmental justice narrative. Greene also teaches journalism at the University of Miami.

The Sidney Award is given once a month to an outstanding piece of socially-conscious journalism by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, which also awards the annual Hillman Prizes every spring. For more information please click here.

For an interview with Greene about the piece, click here.

Since 1950, the Sidney Hillman Foundation has honored journalists whose work fosters social and economic justice. Our prizes and awards celebrate the legacy and vision of Sidney Hillman, founder of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, a predecessor union to Workers United, SEIU.

For more information about the Sidney award and the Hillman Foundation contact Elissa Strauss at elissa.strauss@gmail.com.

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