David Hasemeyr was recently awarded a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Hasemeyer earned the prize with colleagues Lisa Song and Elizabeth McGowan of InsideClimate News for their work on “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of”.
The seven-month investigation explored the million-gallon spill of Canadian tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River in 2010. The Pulitzer committee commended the reporters for their “rigorous reports on flawed regulation of the nation’s oil pipelines, focusing on potential ecological dangers posed by diluted bitumen (or “dilbit”), a controversial form of oil.”
Hasemyer is the son of Del and Athena Hasemyer, who owned an International Harvester dealership in Moab during the uranium boom days. He graduated from Grand County High School in 1973.
Hasemyer said that he started his journalism career at Grand County High School while working on the school’s newspaper, “Sage.”
Last summer, while he was in Moab attending a school reunion, he took time to write a story for InsideClimate News about the tar sands test pit in the Book Cliffs north of Moab called “Nation’s First Tar Sands Mine Stirs Water, Environmental Fears Out West.”
