Investigative Journalists in Puerto Rico uncover lapse in inspections and the government's blind eye

Friday, the IRE posted the collaborative story of a freelance journalist in Puerto Rico, and .

The journalists, Mc Nelly Torress, and Omaya Sosa Pascual, of El Centro Periodistico Investigativo de Puerto Rico, uncovered and reported "decades of environmental violations, financial distress and neglect behind the company that owns the refinery where the Oct. 23 deadly explosion took place in Puerto Rico" According to the IRE website, the stories, a collaboration between journalists in Miami and Puerto Rico were written in Spanish and English and published in El Nuevo Herald and the Miami Herald.

Both the Spanish and English translations exhibit heavy reporting done by the authors of the piece.

The story begins: "For years, federal regulators have cited Caribbean Petroleum Corporation (CAPECO) multiple times for serious environmental violations and levied $1.3 million in penalties and fines for discharging hazardous waste to water, air and soil, showing disregard for residents’ health and safety.

Yet local and federal government agencies have allowed the company to operate interrupted for more than 50 years and have not been diligent in oversight to guarantee a safe operation, an investigation has found. Government’s carelessness includes no federal occupational safety inspections in almost a decade and failing to establish an emergency plan for disasters with the communities as required by law.

The facility at the Luchetti Industrial Park in Bayamon, where an explosion 14 days ago produced a toxic fire that took firefighters over two days to extinguish, and caused fuel leakages into neighboring waterways, had not been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 2000."

So if we examine these first few graphs, the reportage is quite evident. Specifically in the last few sentences, we see the reported would have gone through the public files of the country's Occupational Safety and Health Administration; finding evidence to support their case, the reporters then note a lapse in the inspection system since 2000. This lapse, is evidence of the suspected flaw mentioned in the first part of the paragraphs above.

In order to make such heavy claims on their local government, the two reporters must have ensured their facts were not only correct, but warranted such a grave uncovering in the aftermath of penalties. The reporters seem to point the cause of the toxic fire two weeks ago to the neglect of the inspection agency.

These reports would have required the skills to navigate heavy indexes that denote company files as well as official records of the Occupation Safety and Health Administration. In addition to indexes, they would have had to navigate large search engines and been able to utilize specific Boolean logic to point them toward the documents they were looking to find. Certainly they would not have read through every document put out by the agency between 2000 and 2009.