OUT OF THE SPOTLIGHT BUT ON THE MARK

Elizabeth A. Marchak

'This is the mecca for data, and there are people who are just clueless'

The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) Washington bureau since 1993

BEST-KNOWN INVESTIGATION: ValuJet airlines coverage, 1995-99, that began before the Florida Everglades crash.

FAVORITE INVESTIGATION: "A Deadly Difference: America's Racial Health Divide," revealing a sharp discrepancy in death rates and medical care between blacks and whites, with Dave Davis, March-December 2000.

The afternoon ValuJet lost a DC-9 in the Florida Everglades, Elizabeth Marchak sat down in her basement study and hit the computers. She didn't emerge until 2 a.m. "I just kept thinking of all that humanity," she says. The next morning, the result was a report in the Plain Dealer filled with shocking detail. Safety problems had forced the same plane to return to airports seven times in the previous two years, she reported. The FAA had filed that information but had done little about it. Marchak had begun investigating the airline nearly a year before. Just a month before the crash, she had reported that ValuJet planes had returned to airports for safety reasons at least sixty-eight times in the two-and-a-half years the airline had been in business.

"She clearly spotted something in ValuJet that the rest of the world didn't see until after the crash," says Matthew L. Wald, transportation safety reporter for The New York Times.

Marchak is frequently bothered by an apparent lack of interest in data among many of her Washington-based competitors. "This is the mecca for data, and there are people who are just clueless," she says.

Her flair for the dramatic has helped in her campaign to encourage others to use data, computer technology, and the FOIA to pierce the bureaucratic fog. She's been a regular volunteer trainer for the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR), where she's helped win numerous converts to the cause.

Marchak began her CAR work during a ten-year stint at the Washington Times, with a series documenting instances of pedophilia in the Boy Scouts in all fifty states. But the politically conservative Times made her life difficult. "That's where I rode out the recession," Marchak says, "in a place where I was always an outsider -- because I was a woman, and I was perceived as a liberal. I learned some very valuable lessons as an outsider."

She juggles a packed workday with an equally complicated home life. Her son David, a lively and gifted ten-year-old, struggled for nearly a year with chemotherapy for liver cancer and has difficulty using his hands. Marchak and her husband, W. Stephen Hart, a legislative analyst for the U.S. Forest Service, trade off trips to therapists, teachers, and other specialists. As if that's not enough, Marchak is a big believer in extracurricular projects to relieve the stress. One of her favorites is designing her own clothes. "I don't believe I need to be at the whim of companies that decide this is the year for dusty mauve," she says. Sometimes her side projects tend to take on an investigative edge. One of her latest: an essay for an airline safety manual on the substituting of unsafe parts in airplanes.