That's not the case with The Record in Bergen County, New Jersey. The newspaper undertook an eight-month investigation about one such site, which led last fall to the publication of a compelling five-series, "Toxic Legacy."

The project wove together a wide variety of elements to show how decades-old contamination from a Ford Motor Co. plant "was still wreaking havoc on the environment years after it was supposed to have been cleaned up." In short order, government officials responded forcefully to the problems revealed in the series, which received a rave notice in the Darts & Laurels column of the January-February issue of Columbia Journalism Review. More than a dozen staff members worked on the series and its associated presentation on The Record's website.

A variation on the theme of the previous answer: When "Toxic Legacy" revealed the truth about what had happened in Ringwood and elsewhere, officials had no choice but to act. They and their predecessors had once assured people that things had been handled correctly and that there was no reason for worry. Now it was painfully obvious that was not the case.

Acknowledging that it "may have mis-stepped in the past," the EPA now says it wants to relist the Ringwood site under Superfund, a rare move that would impose strictures on Ford's restarted cleanup. State officials, who had acquiesced in the EPA's actions earlier, are now taking an active, adversarial stance. Former acting Governor Richard Codey ordered an immediate cleanup at the homes of some Ramapoughs and pledged that the state would take over the entire site if the feds don't come through this time. Most recently, state environmental officials say they will do their own environmental testing in Ringwood, which stands in contrast to their earlier reliance on data supplied by the EPA and Ford.

In New York State, officials have ordered Ford to remove a plume of paint sludge that sits in a flood plain of a water-supply river. The Record's testing at the site suggested that lead contamination from the paint sludge is spreading.

Readers responded strongly to "Toxic Legacy." We received many letters to the editor, and a bulletin-board component of our web presentation got more than a hundred postings. Most expressed sympathy and worry for the safety of the Ramapoughs. But there was also significant concern about regional water safety.

Organized crime's historic involvement in trash hauling was no surprise here in the home of Tony Soprano. Nevertheless, some readers were disquieted by the realization that carters also hauled toxic, industrial waste and disposed of it according to the same dump-anywhere rules the mob applied to household garbage.

The most overriding problem was the time period spanned by the story. The Mahwah assembly plant opened 50 years ago and had been closed for a quarter century. The Ringwood dumping took place more than 30 years ago. Even the initial cleanup was completed more than a decade ago.

As a result, many key players were dead, and many others were disinclined, or incapable of accurately recounting key events. We had any number of failures before we could find the right person.

Every aspect of the story was impacted by this obstacle. Even documents needed a filter: They often painted only partial portraits of events, referring to follow-up reports and records that no longer existed.

A close second was getting the Ramapoughs to open up. We wanted to talk to as many people as possible to get a broad picture of their health problems, which ranged from cancer and rare auto-immune diseases to asthma and rashes. But suspicion of outsiders runs deep in the community, and the wall was hard to break down. Any number of confirmed appointments for interviews were forgotten. But our team stayed at it. By the time we published, we had been in dozens of homes.

The environmental testing wasn't as hard as it first appeared. The main problem was finding a comfort level with taking so active a role in a story. But once we realized how important an independent assessment was to the telling of the tale, the testing made eminent sense.

As "Toxic Legacy" grew, we brought people in according to their area of specialty. Barry and Williams anchored the team, as the reporters with the local expertise. The involvement of Alex Nussbaum, our lead environmental reporter, was a no-brainer, and he was made a part of the team early on. Health specialist Mary Jo Layton is a dogged interviewer, one not easily put off, and she joined Williams in assessing the health of the Ramapoughs. Crime reporter Tom Troncone was a natural fit when organized crime became part of this story. Lindy Washburn, another health specialist, has keen analytical skills, so she fielded the water-safety aspect of the story, including our testing.

In addition, Tom Franklin, a senior photographer at The Record, was brought in early and assumed a dual role. In addition to his photographs, Tom added reportage to the mix, in particular helping us break down the walls with the Ramapoughs.

Our line editor was Assignment Editor Debra Lynn Vial, who runs our health/science/environment team.

As projects editor, I was arguably the only member of the team who wasn't pulled from other daily responsibilities for "Toxic Legacy."

The rest of the newsroom strained under the burden of filling in behind so many empty chairs.

We've done all sorts of stories in the wake of "Toxic Legacy." It really was a starting point, rather than a culmination. So, while we may never land another big project on the subject, we're certainly committed to the story, wherever it goes.

Because "Toxic Legacy" engendered a big official response, we've had to do a lot of straight news coverage. But we've also done enterprise, such as a critical look at Ford's latest work plan and what it could mean for the future of the site.

Local television stations have given the story significant coverage, as has the Rockland Journal News, which covers the area in New York just north of the former Ford plant site, where the plume of paint sludge was found.

Persistence. Authoritativeness. Healthy, yet hard-nosed skepticism. Not making assumptions. A recognition of the importance of the obvious. All were much in evidence in "Toxic Legacy." Given the time span of the story, we plumbed many dry holes in tracking down sources. But our reporters kept at it, and eventually we tracked down the people we needed.

The story covered many sensitive topics, so we decided early on to stick with named sources. That added to the difficulty, but it paid dividends by helping to establish "Toxic Legacy" as the authoritative account of the environmental toll imposed by Ford's Mahwah assembly plant. While the automaker issued a statement critical of "Toxic Legacy," no one from the company or any other source has successfully challenged a single premise presented in the story.

In its essence, "Toxic Legacy" was a direct challenge to a pronouncement, a party line that was parroted by all the official sources. So having the common sense, skepticism and guts to challenge underlying assumptions was critical.

Many of the facts we uncovered were "hiding in plain site," as Alex Nussbaum once put it. We made sweeping record requests of all the various government agencies involved in the story and spent weeks poring over records dating from the present to 50 years ago. Those documents were critical in establishing the factual foundation upon which to base our ultimate understanding of events and decisions made long ago.

We also hunted for industrial waste ourselves. Led by nature enthusiast Jan Barry, we hiked off into the woods and scoured the brush for paint sludge and chemical drums. In any number of instances, we found it -- in places where the EPA said it didn't exist.