photo of sign in front of river that warns of dangerous levels of pollution that make all fish inedibleFor the Tennessee Lookout, Ashli Blow (@ashliblow) co-authored a feature on the long-term impact of a chemical plant on its Memphis neighborhood and the people who live there. The company, Velsicol, still technically operates the plant in order to clean up the “legacy pollutants” that contaminate the area after their production ceased long ago. The long-term future of the plant and the clean-up effort are uncertain. Blow and her colleague’s reporting unearthed 40 years of documentation about what exactly has been cleaned up so far at the site and put that in context to explain what that means for the health of the area. And they show how communities can — and already have — organized to win better remediation in the future. Photo by Ashli Blow / Tennessee Lookout