Topher Sanders is a reporter at ProPublica covering railroad safety. Previously he covered race, inequality and the justice system. In 2019, Sanders was part of a team that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Public Service and won the Peabody and George Polk awards for their coverage of President Trump’s family separation policy. In 2018, he and reporter Ben Conarck received the Paul Tobenkin award for race coverage and the Al Nakkula award for police reporting for their multi-part investigation “Walking While Black,” which explored how jaywalking citations are disproportionately given to black pedestrians. His reporting has won a number of other national awards including a NABJ Award, an Online Journalism Award, the John Jay College/Harry Frank Guggenheim award for excellence in criminal justice reporting and he is a two-time winner of the Paul Tobenkin award for coverage of racial intolerance and discrimination.
In 2016 Sanders co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit working to increase the number of investigative reporters and editors of color. He is a graduate of Tuskegee University and started his journalism career at The Montgomery Advertiser in Montgomery, Alabama.
The chemical can trigger health problems and causes more cancer than any other toxic air pollutant. Our reporters traveled around New York City and New Jersey with equipment to measure its presence. The results proved concerning.
A new federal rule requires that local officials in flood-prone areas consider safety features for drain openings. In 2021, ProPublica reported that uncovered storm drains were responsible for at least three dozen deaths over six years.
Thanks to government loopholes, rail companies haven’t been scrutinized by the Federal Railroad Administration for scores of alleged worker injuries and at least two deaths.
After brakeman Chris Cole lost both his legs on the job, railroad officials removed evidence before state regulators could see it, omitted key facts in reports and suspended him from a job he could never return to.
Time and again, Johnny Taylor’s duty to keep the rails safe from disaster conflicted with his employer’s desire to keep its trains running as fast and as frequently as possible, putting his career and family in peril.
Railroad companies have penalized workers for taking the time to make needed repairs and created a culture in which supervisors threaten and fire the very people hired to keep trains running safely. Regulators say they can’t stop this intimidation.
The nation’s largest freight rail carrier failed to fix and continued to use faulty equipment, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. Managers reportedly pressured inspectors to leave the yard so they could keep freight moving.
The railroad company has delivered on early, short-term fixes for the trains blocking kids from getting to school, but some officials are skeptical it will follow through on bigger, permanent changes.
Many railroad employees tell us being injured on the job or reporting a safety concern can be fraught with consequences. Our investigative journalists want to talk with insiders in order to tell this story right.
After seeing images of kids crawling under trains, regulators ask companies to address blocked crossings, lawmakers demand consequences, residents clamor for solutions and Norfolk Southern’s CEO calls a mayor to work out a fix.
When crossings are blocked for hours, kids risk their lives to get to school by crawling through trains that could start at any moment. Ambulances and fire trucks can’t get through. The problem has existed for decades. But it’s getting worse.
Trains are getting longer. Railroads are getting richer. But these “monster trains” are jumping off of tracks across America and regulators are doing little to curb the risk.
In October, months before the East Palestine derailment, the company also directed a train to keep moving with an overheated wheel that caused it to derail miles later in Sandusky, Ohio.
An alarming number of people (especially children) have drowned after disappearing into storm drains during floods. The deadly problem should be easy for federal, state and local government agencies to fix, but tragedy strikes again and again.
Withheld records. Canceled interviews. Slow-walk requests. The Inspector General keeps hitting walls while trying to probe problems in the NYPD. “There’s a reason people call 1 Police Plaza the puzzle palace,” one city official said.
How NYPD officers continue to use chokeholds — which can be deadly and are explicitly prohibited by the department — on civilians, while officers with substantiated claims of abuse go without any meaningful punishment.
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