Despite a Free Smoke Alarm Program, D.C. Residents Are Still Dying In House Fires
August 19, 2021
An excerpt: The beeping started around 4:30 a.m. on Feb. 25.
Tucked into an upstairs bedroom, Stanley and Louise Butler were fast asleep. Their 11-year-old grandson, Sekai, was sleeping just down the hall.
When those three exaggerated beeps echoed throughout the house, a high-pitched cacophony was able to rouse the deepest of sleepers.
“I could hear my husband saying, ‘There’s smoke, there’s smoke, I can’t breathe,’” says retired teacher Louise Butler, 67. “We all met in the hallway and we linked arms and we came down the stairs. The smoke was just billowing up at us. Once we got to the door, we were able to unlock it and go out, but it was frightening. It was horrific.”
Following the route Sekai had mapped for his Boy Scout first responder badge, the three escaped the house, led by retired Reverend Stanley Butler, 64. The fire started with a space heater in the sunroom of their brick colonial on Alabama Avenue SE, but it didn’t stay there. Thick smoke quickly spread to every room in the house.
Read more at Washington City Paper’s website, here.
Some writing for 1A:
The problem with solar energy isn’t investment. It’s location.
Deciding where to build a solar array is complicated. Is the ground flat? How close are the nearest power lines? Do local laws even allow for solar? What happens when that perfect plot of land is in the path of a homeowner’s view or it’s on prime farmland?
The solar industry is booming as declining costs pair with increased incentives to decarbonize our energy grid. Funding from the Inflation Reduction Act alone is expected to increase solar projects by 40 percent in the next five years, according to the Solar Energies Industry Association.
But in many places, those projects rely on community buy-in to succeed.
Some solar projects have recently been derailed or delayed because of worries over treasured landscapeand local ecology, potential impacts to housing values and even misinformation campaigns.
One nonprofit on Mount Desert Island, Maine, wants communities to prepare for the solar boom long before they’re approached by developers.
Read my full report. It also aired on 1A Sept 30, 2022.
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Did This Colorado County Find The Healthcare Solution?
From my newspaper days:
The Parkway Series
A five-part longform narrative about a series of cold-case murders won a Virginia Press Association Multimedia Features Award. This is hard to access online, but I’m happy to share the pdf, please just email me.
Tanzania’s Challenge in Preventing Deforestation
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
April 16, 2016
An excerpt: Elizabeth Joseph wakes early each morning to prepare for a busy day ahead—cooking, cleaning, farming, and caring for children and livestock are all in a day’s work.
So is theft.
Read more at the Pulitzer Center.