YAKIMA, Wash. -- Yakima Herald-Republic reporter Leah Beth Ward was recognized Tuesday for her investigation last year on well water contamination in the Lower Yakima Valley.

Ward was one of two journalists who received special citations from the 2009 James V. Risser Prize in Western Environmental Journalism.

The award is co-sponsored by the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists at Stanford University and the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Named after a former director of the Knight Fellowships program and Washington bureau chief for the Des Moines Register, the Risser Prize is open to print, broadcast and online journalists who cover environmental issues in the U.S., Canada and Mexico that are distinctly "Western."

Two reporters and a photographer from The Seattle Times won the $5,000 award for their 2008 series that documented how clear-cutting timber in Southwest Washington led to landslides in the region.

Ward's three-part series, "Hidden Wells, Dirty Water," published in October, showed that as many as 30,000 Lower Valley residents -- most of them Latino farm workers -- had been drinking well water contaminated by nitrates.

One contest judge said Ward's reporting "alerted communities across the state to the nitrate pollution that appeared in their water supplies through gaps in government oversight and has given a moving portrait of the citizens who are suffering the consequences." The project was made possible with the assistance of a University of Southern California Annenberg/California Endowment Health Fellowship.

Herald-Republic Editor Bob Crider called the special citation a testament to Ward's work in exposing the lack of cooperation and knowledge among various agencies.

"The work she did is something the government did not do," Crider said, "and she's to be commended for that."

A second citation was given to Erik Denison, of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation National Radio, for a story on how oil companies in Alberta have created lakes of toxic black sludge, causing the deaths of thousands of ducks and raising fears of higher cancer rates.

Judges of the 2009 Risser Prize were John Daley, a reporter at KSL-TV in Salt Lake City; Philip Hilts, director of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT; Judy Pasternak, a writer, author and winner of the Risser Prize in 2007; and Paul Rogers, an environmental reporter at the San Jose Mercury News and managing editor of "QUEST," a public television program on science, the environment and nature.