Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association

"Hidden Wells, Dirty Water," a three-day series in the  Yakima Herald-Republic, is winner of the 2009 Dolly Connelly Excellence-in-Environmental-Journalism Award, presented annually by PNNA. The series revealed that as many as 30,000 Yakima Valley residents, mostly Latino farm workers, have been drinking water contaminated by nitrates and coliform bacteria, which generally come from commercial fertilizer and dairy manure.

The series author, Leah Beth Ward, disclosed how agencies responsible for drinking water and environmental health failed to act even when presented with evidence of groundwater contamination. At the same time, the state's dairy industry lobby won legislation that limited inspections and enforcement of laws on manure management.

The Yakima Herald-Republic is a two-time winner of the Connelly award, which includes a $750 prize and a framed certificate. Its first prize came for a series examining impacts of the dairy industry's move into the Yakima Valley.

"Hidden Wells, Dirty Water" was described as "well-reported, compellingly written and strongly presented" by former New York Times national correspondent Sam Verhovek, a judge in the competition. He added that the series was "an inspiring example of resourcefulness."

Joel Connelly, a columnist with seattlepi.com and formerly, for 36 years, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter and columnist, praised The Herald Republic for overcoming budget limitations and "doing a first class job of reporting on a coach budget."

The Connelly award was endowed by Joel Connelly and the late P-I publisher J.D. Alexander in honor of Joel's mother Dolly Connelly, a longtime Time-Life correspondent and freelance writer in the Pacific Northwest. Dolly Connelly wrote about such major environmental issues as creation of the North Cascades National Park and the battle over siting an aluminum plant at Guemes Island in northern Puget Sound. She covered, for Sports Illustrated, the first ascent of Mt. Kennedy in the Yukon by Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and famed mountaineer Jim Whittaker.

Dolly Connelly was one of the first American journalists to spend time in eastern Siberia, and she ventured to such remote locales as St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea. She once rode shotgun on a Lynden Transport truck driving the Alaska Highway in the middle of winter.

She worked with Martin Litton, then-travel editor of Sunset magazine, in reporting on such environmental battlegrounds as Washington's Glacier Peak Wilderness, where Kennicott Copper wanted to site a half-mile-wide open pit mine.

Dolly Connelly lived in and wrote about the Northwest from 1946 almost to her death in 1995. 

Newspapers in Washington, Oregon, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Alaska and British Columbia have won the Connelly Award.