InvestigateWest

Washington — home to deadliest landslide in the U.S. history — is working to prevent future loss of life by scanning the state for new threats. For years, small planes have buzzed across the skies of Washington carrying specialized instrument packages that peer down through the belly of the aircraft. As they soar above mountains, rivers and valleys, the machinery paints the topography below with laser light thousands of times per second, reflecting the contours of the landscape back to onboard sensors as data, which is later processed to create detailed scans of the terrain.

Sivani Kumaran helplessly watched relatives leave Sri Lanka. They fled the island nation south of India for a number of reasons, including a 25-year-long civil war that ended in 2009. Then, seven years ago, Kumaran finally got her chance. She, her husband and their two children got visas from the so-called green card lottery program and moved to Seattle.

Investigation finds school officials don’t follow the rules on reporting abusive isolation and restraint when they send students out of state or to private facilities. In 2015, state Rep. Gerry Pollet, a Seattle Democrat, introduced a bill meant to dramatically reduce physical restraint and isolation of students in Washington.

The owner of a wood treatment plant is trying to walk away from its mess in West Eugene, Oregon. Neighbors say, not so fast. It was 10:47 p.m. when Arjorie Arberry-Baribeault got the phone call that changed her life. A doctor diagnosed her daughter, Zion, then 13, with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Two years later, the son of her best friend and neighbor was diagnosed with the same cancer. Once childhood pals, their kids were now teenagers with matching lumps on their necks. “Wait a damn minute,” Arberry-Baribeault thought. “They’ve played in the same water, the same parks. … What made our kids sick?” The teens’ cancers joined a long list of ailments affecting residents of West Eugene, Oregon. And they thought they knew the culprit: a nearby wood treatment facility.

Sen. Jim Woodward, R-Sagle, started hearing about the messages reaching his constituents in mid-February, right in the middle of the legislative session. “Sen. Jim Woodward partnered with far-left Democrats to kill a bill to protect parental rights in Idaho,” a Facebook ad that ran from Feb. 16 to 27 read.

Refugee resettlement in the Puget Sound continues for Afghan and Ukrainian nationals. Zahra Karini was the last person to board her Aug. 26, 2021, flight — an overcrowded American military plane that would let her and several hundred other Afghans flee the Taliban and enter the United States. As...

Following a record fine in January for illegally dumping wastewater, the Port of Morrow continued to pump nitrogen-rich water onto northeast Oregon farms, according to a revised penalty from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. On Friday, the department announced it is raising the port’s fine, to more than $2.1...

“This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.”. Following a report claiming that Amazon used nearly 600 million pounds of plastic to package its products in 2020, shareholders turned out in record numbers to demand that the company reduce its plastic packaging. Investors...

Idaho’s congressional delegation has received hundreds of thousands of dollars of support from gun rights organizations — and has stayed mostly quiet on the topic of new gun safety and gun control proposals now making their way through the U.S. Congress. The four men who represent Idahoans in...

For years, many foster kids in Washington with nowhere else to go have been put up in hotels, crammed into offices overnight, or sent out of the state. The practices have been lambasted by lawmakers and advocates, and they sparked a class-action lawsuit last year. The state reached a settlement...

Policymakers and homeowners are scrambling to manage the so-called ‘wildland-urban interface’ to mitigate the threat. At 9 on a Saturday morning, Dan Holman, a 74-year-old retired oncologist, picks up a chainsaw and heads into the forest. The forest in question is on the slopes of a hill outside...

Yakima was the only Washington county to have rent assistance funds forcibly reallocated under the federal ‘use it or lose it’ approach. Missed spending deadlines lost Yakima County more than $1 million in federal rent relief last year, making it the only Washington county to see funds clawed back by the U.S. Treasury Department program.

State Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin, D-Corvallis, had experienced what she calls a “bad education day” before she showed up to a June 2 legislative education committee. A parent in her district had gone to Facebook to share that their high school would no longer provide her child with a disability class time after third period for the rest of the school year due to staffing issues.

“This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.”. In January, a poll commissioned by the ocean conservation nonprofit Oceana showed that 82 percent of Americans would support a ban on the sale and distribution of single-use plastics by the National Park Service. Now, that vision will become a reality. The Department of the Interior, or DOI, has announced a phaseout of single-use plastics — not only in national parks, but across the hundreds of millions of acres of public lands that the department manages.

After a white supremacist recently killed 10 Black shoppers at a grocery store in New York, Reyna Lopez started to get texts from the leaders of Oregon social and racial justice nonprofits. “We wondered, are we vulnerable as well?” she said. The mass shooting last month at Tops market...

InvestigateWest is thrilled to announce the addition of two full-time investigative reporters, both of whom have a long track record of unearthing critical stories around the West. Kaylee Tornay, who grew up in Bend, Oregon, most recently covered education for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where she led an investigation...

The World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020. The coronavirus had spread to at least 114 countries by then, and — though nobody knew it at the time — was already in Idaho. “Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is...

How last year’s record-breaking heat wave caused misery and chaos for Washington’s incarcerated population — and why it’s set to happen all over again. Late last June, farmers in Walla Walla, Washington, noticed something odd happening to their onions. Walla Walla, an oasis in the middle of the state’s high desert, is bursting with vineyards, wheat fields and acres of the city’s eponymous sweet onions. As temperatures climbed above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, then above 110 degrees, the oversized onions began to burn, pale blisters forming underneath their papery skins. When the temperature reached 116, the onions started cooking, their flesh dissolving into mush.

InvestigateWest is pleased to announce the addition of two board members who bring a wealth of experience in journalism, storytelling, community engagement and volunteerism to the nonprofit newsroom. Diana Huynh and Joshua Trujillo were enthusiastically voted onto the board earlier this month as part of InvestigateWest’s ongoing effort to grow...

A center on gun violence is in the making in Oregon. A researcher at Oregon Health & Science University and the VA Portland Health Care System, recently obtained a grant to create a Gun Violence Prevention Research Center to step up research on gun deaths and injuries, their causes and strategies for prevention. Kathleen Carlson, an epidemiologist and gun injury researcher, said the grant of $250,000 a year for three years is enough to hire staff and become a resource center for data on gun violence and injuries in Oregon and across the region.