MELANIE ALNWICK ('89) WAS COVERING A ROUTINE ASSIGNMENT WHEN AN ACTIVIST SHE WAS INTERVIEWING TOLD HER, "YOU DON'T CARE."

  Her accuser, desperate for someone to uncover the arsenic contamination in an upscale Washington, D.C., neighborhood, couldn't have been more wrong. He met his match in Alnwick, who had devoted months of her life -- including her personal time -- to the story.

Alnwick, a general assignment re-porter for the capital area's WTTG Fox 5, recently won a national Emmy award for Outstanding Regional News Story
-- Investigative Reporting for her work on Buried Secrets.

The story that inspired Alnwick to do "more work than I have ever done on a story" exposed how a community of million-
dollar homes came to be built unbeknownst to the homeowners on the former site of a chemical weapons testing site used during World War I.

Alnwick, along with the station's news director, Katherine Green, accepted the award Sept. 3 at a ceremony in New York City.

"Melanie's work exposed a tremendous problem in a high-end neighborhood that many people did not want to see exposed," Green says. "She has spent hours and hours and hours doing research" and demonstrated "intense perseverance. … She really had to work against a lot of obstacles."

The neighborhood, Spring Valley, includes more than 1,200 properties with arsenic contamination. Alnwick was the first television reporter to tackle the story. "It's really such a newspaper piece because there's so much history and background," Alnwick says. In May, however, the station devoted 12 minutes of airtime to Alnwick's reporting. "That's unheard of in a local broadcast," she says. And the station gave it more time in June, July and August.

Pits with buried chemicals continue to be uncovered. A compound more deadly than mustard gas was created at the chemical weapons site. Scientists developed lewisite, a "dark, oily liquid containing 36 percent arsenic that irritates the eyes, skin and lungs," according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The chemical was tested on animals and people.  Alnwick's reporting included talking to the son of a man who had been a test subject.

2003 has been a huge year for Alnwick, who got married, bought a house, won an Emmy and appeared in GLAMOUR magazine. "My goal is just to keep taking advantage of opportunities to tell great stories," she says, "wherever that may take me."

Story by Donna Ragsdale Dunn ('94)