Three separate Center for Public Integrity investigations examining toxic air, green energy contracts and hazards in oil refineries have won 1^st place honors in the Society of Professional Journalists’ prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Awards.

The prizes, among the national winners in a contest attracting more than 1,700 entries, were awarded for:

• Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities: Produced in partnership with National Public Radio and the Investigative News Network — won top honors for Public Service in Online Journalism. The series explored how, more than two decades after enhancements to the Clean Air Act, many communities still suffer poisoned air and regulatory neglect. The Center’s main stories were written by Jim Morris, Chris Hamby, Ronnie Greene, Elizabeth Lucas and Emma Schwartz.
• Green Energy: Contracts, Connections and the Collapse of Solyndra: Written by Ronnie Greene in partnership with ABC News, won the top honor for Online Investigative reporting. The series of reports documented breakdowns in the process by which the Department of Energy awarded lucrative green energy grants and loans.
• Fueling Fears: Written by Jim Morris and Chris Hamby, won top honors in Online Non-deadline reporting. The reports examined worker and environmental hazards at America’s aging oil refineries.

The national prizes were announced this week, and will be presented at a July 20 ceremony at the National Press Club.

For years, people living in the Mississippi River town of Muscatine, Iowa, have complained about the ash and smoke blowing into their neighborhood from a corn processing plant. State regulators have brought enforcement cases against the company, but the town’s South End neighborhood remains under a haze.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stepped in, alleging years of violations of air pollution rules at the plant owned by Grain Processing Corp. The letter issued to the company, known as GPC, doesn’t impose penalties, but puts it on notice that the EPA is considering an enforcement case.

GPC spokesman Janet Sichterman said company officials are reviewing the notice and “aren’t in a position to make a comment on it now.”

The action comes as the company is battling the Iowa attorney general, who has alleged separate violations of air and water pollution rules in a lawsuit. A group of citizens, calling themselves Clean Air Muscatine, has filed a petition to intervene in that case, saying the state’s previous actions against GPC have failed to protect people living near the facility.

For many in New England, fresh powdered snow is a welcome sign of the season. For Maine mother Jill Callela, the flakes showcase something much darker — the dirty air her family is breathing.

“OK, we have black snow again,” Callela, 39, said, remembering recent winters when the factory directly across the river from her home in Bradley, Maine, polluted the snow in her yard with what she says was lead-laden soot spewed from its smokestack.

Tests Callela had done have shown elevated levels of lead in the snow, she said. Icy winds sweeping over the Penobscot River behind her home amplified the problem.

“It was in everyone’s house and got into the blowers in our cars,” Callela said. “When we would turn on our heaters it would come through the vents.”

The factory, Old Town Fuel & Fiber, a paper mill, has over the past five years racked up $267,000 in federal air pollution fines for releasing illegal amounts of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and methanol into the air above its facility.

Callela claims her complaints about the mill to state regulators have been ignored even though it is among a number of New England facilities labeled “high priority violators” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. A facility can become a high priority violator, or HPV, by exceeding emission limits, violating a local state or federal order or meeting other criteria developed by the EPA to identify polluters in need of close scrutiny.

An investigation by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting shows that regulators in Maine and nearby states have taken months and even years to sanction facilities violating the Clean Air Act — even those the government itself has called HPVs, such as the Old Town paper mill.

When the top environmental regulator in Kansas rejected its bid to build two new power units in 2007, citing health concerns, Sunflower Electric Power Corp. refused to take no for an answer. When the governor vetoed bills that would have paved the way for construction in 2008 and 2009, Sunflower again refused to relent.

The company’s persistence paid off. In 2009, the new governor approved construction of a new coal plant in the tiny city of Holcomb, so long as Kansas legislators backed renewable energy policies at the same time. The state regulator who initially denied Sunflower’s permit? He was let go.

Sunflower said it won the permit on merit, and that political influence was not a factor.

Yet the company’s success is a telling snapshot of how, when industry flexes its muscles over Clean Air Act issues, it often wins. From Kansas to Louisiana to Texas, Wisconsin and Ohio, community groups have fought new plants, expansions and chronic emissions – only to see industry score victories with regulators and politicians.

“We’re not protecting public health today,” said Jim Tarr, an air pollution consultant in California who worked as an engineer for the Texas Air Control Board in the 1970s. “One of the primary reasons we’re not is that the environmental agencies have been co-opted by the people doing the polluting.”

Industry’s influence plays out at every step of the process: From the campaign contributions it spreads to sway policy to its role shaping clean air rules to its resistance to enforcement actions brought by regulators.

Its reach is deeper than most realize.

Two just-published reports – one from academic researchers, the other from the Environmental Protection Agency’s own inspector general – detail industry’s role in shaping Clean Air Act regulations meant to protect communities from dirty air.

Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson released the details of a regulation that would cut air emissions of mercury and other toxics from coal- and oil-fired power plants for the first time.

The new standard is seen as a victory for environmentalists and public health advocates, who have pushed the EPA to reduce emissions from the power industry since the passage of the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. While the standard was issued last Friday, interest groups said the Obama administration made supporters wait until bickering in Congress died down so the landmark rule could have the spotlight.

“Last week, we finalized the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, or MATS, a rule that will protect millions of families and, especially, children from air pollution,” Jackson said at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington on Wednesday. “Before this rule, there were no national standards that limited the amount of mercury, arsenic, chromium, nickel and acid gases power plants across the country could release into the air we breathe.”

Mercury, a coal combustion byproduct, is a potent neurotoxin linked to decreased motors skills and lower IQs. It’s among nearly 200 hazardous chemicals, known as air toxics, which have been the subject of the Poisoned Places series by the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News and NPR.