In this episode of How They Did It, Quỳnh Lê talks with Alexa York, winner of the 2025 Barlett & Steele Award for Outstanding Young Journalist. York shares how her investigation at The Blade revealed radioactive groundwater contamination in Luckey, Ohio, a discovery that led to state and federal action. Now a graduate student at Columbia University, she reflects on what it took to report the story and what she’s still working to uncover.
Visit businessjournalism.org/awards to view all the 2025 winners.
Transcript
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Quỳnh Lê: Welcome to How They Did It. This is the podcast where we talk with journalists about how they report powerful stories. I’m Quỳnh Lê. Today’s guest is Alexa York. She won the 2025 Barlett & Steele Award for Outstanding Young Journalist.
Alexa earned that award for her investigation at The Blade. She found radioactive contamination in the groundwater near an old weapons site in Luckey, Ohio. People in charge had said the site was fine. But Alexa ran her own tests – and found radiation levels way above federal limits. The story got attention fast. After her story came out, state, local, and federal agencies launched their own investigations. Alexa now studies journalism at Columbia University. Today, we’ll talk about how she did it, what she learned, and what she’s still working to uncover.
Alexa, thank you so much for being here. Maybe we can start with you introducing yourself a little, who you are and what you’re working on these days.
Alexa York: I guess to start, I’m 27 years old. I’m a journalism student now at Columbia University. So I just started a grad program a couple months ago. But before that, I worked as a journalist – an investigative journalist and general assignment reporter – at the Toledo Blade back in Ohio. And as you know, it wasn’t something I had gotten into intentionally. I kind of fell my way into it.
Lê: To go back to the beginning of this investigation, you’ve talked about the moment in the Library of Congress, opening a folder and seeing Luckey, Ohio on the cover. What was that moment like?
York: I think it was sort of like a freeze-frame moment. So, I wasn’t expecting to find anything on Luckey there. So to see, to see something like that on the cover, especially something that was declassified, and a document that I had never seen before, or never had seen reference to before. It was pretty surreal.
Lê: That’s really interesting. That wasn’t listed anyway, and yet, you found it in the library? What made you decide to dig deeper?
York: I had a lot of questions, I think, after seeing it, and I couldn’t really find any answers anywhere. To me, it didn’t make sense that that document would be there, and I hadn’t seen a reference to it before, for example, online. I mean, you can’t find anything about that document online, and I hadn’t seen the Army Corps of Engineers reference it either; they had included some historical records for Luckey and some of them were declassified, but nothing remotely related to worker exposure.
And I guess I just assumed that everything the Army Corps had put in their own records was the entirety of it. I hadn’t considered that they had only put in some documents and left out some of the crazier stuff.
Lê: It’s amazing how you know you caught that, and once you started, how did the story begin to take shape? Were there any turning points when you realized that this was bigger than you expected?
York: Yeah, so, I mean, the Library of Congress was the turning point, for sure, but the story didn’t take shape for a very long time after that. I think probably because I wasn’t a journalist, I was bouncing all over the place. I didn’t know what to look for. I was falling down all of these different rabbit holes, one after another, and only some of them ended up being useful.
But it took months and months before I reached out to a reporter later that year, at the end of the year, this would have been in May, and then it wasn’t a couple months after that, so I guess about a year before the story really started to take shape, and I knew what it was going to look like.
Lê: It’s interesting – You went from figuring out what the story even was to dealing with some really complex, technical work. One of the most technical parts was the water sampling. You worked with a Department of Defense–accredited lab, which isn’t something most reporters do. How did you decide on that lab?
York: I talked to my editor first, and he said, “Well, you can’t just pick the closest lab in Ohio that can test that because they’re going to knock it down. He had done testing stories before, and that was one of the criticisms that, not like this. He tested like cell phones for radio frequency radiation, so a little similar, but not to the same level. But he suggested that for something like this, for something sensitive like this, you want to pick the same lab that these guys are using, because they can’t knock down their own lab. And as for going for a Department of Defense, I looked up online what all of the DoD-accredited labs were. I found a list on one of their own websites. Ironically, I saw that there was a lab called the Luckey Foos Wrap Lab, which was on-site. So there’s a trailer on the Luckey site cleanup that’s, I guess, its own standalone DoD-accredited lab. So I thought that was interesting – that Luckey was listed as its own lab, but it wasn’t open to the public, obviously. So I picked a lab that was also on that list that was open to the public. So it was literally the same level of accreditation as the Luckey site used.
Lê: And after that, what happened? What are the results?
York: So we tested for a very long time, over about nine months, and it was a lot of touch-and-go. So we tested at the beginning, one round of wells. We waited for those results to show up, and then we kind of took a look and figured out where to go next.
So we did that for several rounds, and at the end, what we ended up seeing was high levels of this element called bismuth-214, which is something I hadn’t really heard of or seen much. It’s not regulated. But we talked to a lot of people, and we found out that it meant that there were very likely high levels of radon in the drinking water. And it’s something that’s naturally occurring, so it does exist in the environment, but not at the levels that we found. And it didn’t line up with what you would see in normal drinking water.
Lê: And when those first results came back, especially the ones that you just mentioned, that were unexpectedly high, what went through your mind?
York: I was so confused. I was thinking like, what? I did not expect to find that. I wasn’t sure what I expected, honestly, because there just hadn’t been any testing done before, so I didn’t know what to expect. I went off of the testing that had been done on site, what it had shown and what I personally felt like had been left out. So that was a lot of questions that the first round of sampling raised.
But the other thing that really struck me is that one of the wells in our first round had something called cobalt-60 in it, which is something I also discussed a bit in my story. Cobalt-60, we got low levels. So it wasn’t anything high or anything that would be a health threat, but the levels we found, I guess, the fact that we had gotten it at all was alarming. We should not have found cobalt-60. It doesn’t exist in in the natural environment, and it’s sort of like a nuclear waste product, so you wouldn’t necessarily find it unless there were some sort of radioactivity problem, and that was another thing too, because I know it was, ended up being characterized as a false positive, likely a false positive by the the EPA and the Army Corps. But that’s not what our lab said. That’s not what our experts said. They said that if you’re getting it, it’s there.
Lê: And you got all the results back, and you also got access to decades-old legal documents that had been stored in someone’s garage. Those documents led to the second part of your story. What did it feel like to read the transcripts from decades ago and know they had never been made public?
York: I think it was just kind of sad, because people had read them before. The depositions were probably not as commonly read, but the documents had existed. People had read them. People had said those things, and I just didn’t understand how no one had looked into it before, or no one had come out and said anything about it, because my story, and I think this is one of the things that makes it so unique, is that it’s 80 years. That’s generations and generations of people who knew something, and no one said anything. That was kind of sad.
Lê: Yeah, and you mentioned how people had known about this for years but rarely spoke about it. When you started reaching out, talking with residents or collecting samples, what was the most memorable moment for you?
York: The most memorable part for me was sometimes, I mean, I’d be chatting with people. It wasn’t always like an on-the-record formal interview when I was talking to them, because I just don’t necessarily think that would have been the right way to approach it, with people who haven’t been interviewed before.
But sometimes, once in a while, everyone would just drop something crazy. And this was, I mean, this is out in a farm. Most of these people, I mean, no one I interviewed was a scientist or had a background in any of this, but every once in a while they would just say something really technical that they had heard about the site, and I just would know it would be true, and I couldn’t publish this stuff because I couldn’t back it up. Obviously, I didn’t have documents or anything, but it just made me realize, these people were around people who knew stuff, and they just picked it up. There was one woman I tested who had used to own a bar in town way back. And when she had worked at this bar, some workers from the Goodyear plant, which it used to be until the late-80s or so, would stop by and just like chat with her. And she said, “I heard the Luckey site made the ceramic tiles for the space shuttle.” And I had never read that before. I had never seen it in any documents. I still haven’t, I still haven’t found anything that says that it was but no one really knows that beryllium, which is what the site made, was used in tiles, was used in ceramics or was used on the space shuttle, so I don’t know, the fact that she just pulled that out of nowhere was really crazy for me. That was memorable.
Lê: I also remember there was a part of you walking into the bar when, it’s a conference or a bar that says “men only”?
Alexa York: Oh yeah, the library. It was a men’s only coffee club-type thing that happens every, I think it still happens, every Monday morning in Luckey and it’s a group of retired men, mostly, who just come and talk about whatever’s on their mind. They get a cup of coffee, they sit around like a conference room table in the library, and they just chat about whatever for a couple of hours, and they go home.
But I heard about that through someone my sister knew. So, my sister mentioned that this might be a good place for me to stop by and see if anyone would like to talk. So I did, and it was really awkward to be walking as a young woman into a room of old, old retired men and just like asking to talk as a reporter, and that’s not something that had happened there before. But I think it helped that I was from there, and I was looking into the beryllium plant, which no one had ever really asked them about it before, so I think that they were happy to share, and I don’t think they got any vibes that I was being malicious or secretive or out to get anyone. So I think that they were more willing to talk to me because of that.
Lê: And when you think back on the whole investigation, what’s the most memorable feeling or image that still stays with you?
York: I was just thinking about this the other day. This isn’t an image I ended up using in the final story, but it was something I found in The Blade archives. So I used some photos that the Blade has physical archives, on site, they have all of their photos, press clips – everything – going back at least 100 years.
The owners of The Blade had a rule that you’re not allowed to throw anything out, which I think is a nice rule. It was helpful for me. But they have just so much stuff on everything, and I was able to find physical copies of Luckey stuff. But there was a picture from 1986 that was of the front of the plant, and it was like a bunch of workers leaving for work from the day. I think there was some sort of strike going on there or something that Blade had been covering, but it was just a very normal photo. The workers were smiling. They were happy. They had just finished up with work for the day. A lot of them were from Toledo, and it was just a very, very normal photo. But I knew that in 1986, at that time, like behind the scenes, because I had seen the documents, Goodyear was talking to the Department of Energy, they were talking to the Department of Defense. Their legal team was getting involved because they had begun to realize that there was a radiation problem and that there was a beryllium problem, and that the employees could be at risk, and that’s what their internal documents said.
But to see this photo of all the workers smiling and happy and like, not knowing anything that was going on, that was what really stuck with me because a lot of the people in the 50s are dead now, most of them are dead now, but not in the 80s. I mean, those workers in the 80s would still be alive now, and for me to know what was going on behind the scenes for something that, in my opinion, still hasn’t been rectified, especially not for the workers. That really stuck with me. That was really memorable.
Lê: And then after that, you got the data, you got the documents, the story started coming together. And what’s your next step, asking the authorities or the people to try to get more information? And how do you handle them?
York: So I guess that is another that would have been a step we moved on to eventually. A month or two before publication, is when we started what we call “closeout interviews.” And that was when we started reaching out to the big groups involved, to share what we had found and to try and interview them in person. And we did that a couple of months beforehand, because we knew that it was going to be time-consuming, and we wanted to make sure they had enough time to go through everything, and that we had time to go through everything with them. So the main four groups I want to say that we reached out to were the Army Corps, of course, then the Ohio Health Department, the Ohio EPA, and then the beryllium company, which is called Materion now.
And it was kind of a mixed bag in terms of responses that we got from them, and that was the most difficult part to do. With the Health Department and the state health departments and EPA, for example, they got back to us pretty quick and said, “Yeah, we’re not going to talk to you,” more or less. They said, “We don’t comment on third-party sample results.” That was strange to me, because they were legally responsible for that. I mean, for testing that’s done inside the village, that’s not the Army Corps of Engineers’ responsibility, then it becomes the state’s responsibility if there’s a water issue. But for them to just kind of turn around and immediately say – even though we had used a good lab and we sent them all of the results – for them to just say, “Yeah, we’re not going to comment on this,” and to just like, say, “Yeah, this is over, we’re not, we’re done with this.” That was crazy. That didn’t feel like the response I would have expected from a government agency.
So it was interesting that when we did the same thing to the Army Corps, they agreed to meet us in person and talk to us in person. And that was when we drove out to Buffalo, New York, to meet with them in their offices, they ended up contacting the Ohio EPA and the health department after the meeting, and that made the state, I guess, reverse their position.
So it was really difficult negotiating our way through that, especially because I had never done this before. I’m trying to work with federal and state agencies and then also the beryllium company, which is kind of separate from the three government agencies, but yeah, that was really difficult, and that was hard to negotiate, and I’m very glad that I had good editors to help me with that, to make sure that I was doing it right.
Lê: Now looking back is there anything that you regret that you could have done differently?
York: Yeah, so many things. The main thing is that I wish I just would have gotten more experts in the beginning, when we’re waiting in between rounds of testing. At the time, we were really unsure of at what point should we make this public, because we weren’t sure what we were looking at, and we weren’t sure who we could trust. And then a lot of people I had contacted early in the process didn’t want to talk to me, so I contacted our local universities, and they didn’t really want to talk. That was kind of disappointing.
It was just so hard to get experts to talk to who understood what we were looking at, and to do it on the record. Because I think a lot of them, even if they had stuff to say, they didn’t want to do it on the record to speak against government agencies, which I understand. I understand it. But it was frustrating because no one, almost no one, would do that, even though we were able to get a lot of input and feedback. Really, no one wanted to go on the record, so it was hard. I just wish that I had found a better way to get more people on the record sooner. That was something I wish I could’ve done better.
Lê: So after 12 months of the story being produced, how did it shape the way you view or practice journalism?
York: That’s a good question. I was really skeptical of journalism before I started, like when I reached out to the reporter that eventually became my editor, he suggested I turn this into journalism myself. And I laughed. I wasn’t planning on being a journalist. And I kind of assumed that people don’t like journalists. And I mean, I think that assumption is sort of can be true a lot of the time, which is sad. It is hard to get people to talk to you if they just immediately look down on you because of your profession, no matter what your intentions are.
So I think it taught me that journalism isn’t just what people view it as. I think that there are a lot of journalists that are honest and are doing things for the right reasons, and that investigative journalism in particular just has a very long, specific process, and you can take your time, and that’s okay, and that just kind of surprised me about journalism. I didn’t really know that going in.
Lê: You’ve clearly stayed with this story for a long time, even after publishing it. During that whole process, did you ever face any ethical dilemma along the way?
York: Yes. It’s interesting you say this because I just started my ethics class last week, and one of the first things I talked about was some of the ethical issues I faced in this. The biggest one was I was worried about bias, because I was from Luckey. I mean, that’s a real thing. I mean, you can be a journalist and write on your experience, but you still bring bias to that, whether you can help it or not. So that kind of bugged me a little bit, like am I actually impartial here? Should I be the only one reporting on this? And I think it helped that I had a lot of editors that I could talk to about this stuff, and they were able to guide me in the right direction, because they were, they didn’t have the same bias that I did in the subject. But at the same time, I don’t feel like anyone else could have reported the story.
A lot of topics you could just put another reporter on the story, but I don’t think that could have been done here, because no one else had the same knowledge that was needed to do the story. So that was a bit of a dilemma that I faced. But we wanted to make sure that we weren’t hiding the fact that I was from Luckey. So I think, like we said it in my bio at the bottom of the story, and then we also published, like a first-person essay to go along with the story that I think was like the story behind the story, basically saying who I was and how I got to the story. So I think in publishing the story, we just wanted to make it clear. Not that I had a bias per se, but we just didn’t want to hide it. I think we felt that it could become an issue if someone found out about it, we just wanted to disclose it right away, because it wasn’t a problem inherently. But I think anytime you’re trying to hide something as a reporter, then it might get a little dicey.
Lê: And now what’s next for you? Any story or beat that’s calling your name?
York: I’m figuring out my master’s project right now, and it’s still in the early stages. I want to do something with Cold War sites, similar to Luckey, but I’m not going to be doing like a full-blown testing story again. I just don’t have the time, and I need a breather also. But, I’m looking and figuring out what I want to do for my master’s project. I know it’s going to be Cold War sites. I have a really great master’s advisor that really sees eye to eye with me, and has good ideas for me. So I’m excited to see what that’ll turn into.
Lê: And what about Luckey? Are you still thinking about it or working on it, or once the story was published, did you feel like you were done with it?
York: No, I’m still thinking about it. There are still a lot of records that I want to get for the site. Even though my reporting is done, my biggest frustration is that there is still a huge part of that story that hasn’t been told, and I think that a lot of it’s classified or sitting in random archives across the country that I haven’t been to yet. Because I know there are at least a few different archives, outside of D.C., in Atlanta, and then I think there’s also some in Cleveland that I really want to get to, that I know have Luckey records, but I don’t know what they are, and, it bugs me.
I mean, I think it’s maybe a journalist thing that you want to know all the details. You want to get to the bottom of the story. The fact that there’s, there’s just a lot of missing pieces with what happened at Luckey things that didn’t make sense, like the radioactivity part, for example, what exactly caused the radioactivity is still not really clear to me. So yes, to answer your question, yeah, I’m still digging into the records. I’m still looking into it a lot, and I’m still Google-searching stuff, even though I know it’s not going to pop up with anything useful to me anymore. So I’m still kind of on the job.
Lê: Alexa, thanks for sharing your reporting, and congratulations again on winning the Barlett & Steele Award for Outstanding Young Journalist.
York: Thank you, thank you.
Lê: That’s the end of our conversation. This is “How They Did It.” I’m Quỳnh Lê. See you next time.
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