In the last 10 months, residents in neighborhoods across Omaha, Nebraska, have contacted the city and federal government after tests by the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica showed they had enough of the toxic metal in their yards for the dirt to be dug up and replaced under Environmental Protection Agency rules.

But the responses they’ve received have been inconsistent.

Three of them received new testing and were promised additional cleanup. Yet others were denied a new cleanup or told the news organizations they never heard back. 

One resident said the city tested her yard, found it exceeded the EPA’s lead contamination level and sent her a letter saying cleanup was necessary. Months later the city backtracked, saying she did not qualify because she lived outside the primary cleanup zone. Another said she called 14 times before the city told her it would not retest because she hadn’t built or demolished anything in her yard since the EPA replaced the soil in 2012. 

The EPA and the city have spent decades cleaning up residential properties in east Omaha after a century of pollution from a lead smelter and other factories downtown. The EPA had set a lead level that it uses to determine which properties to clean up, and the news organizations’ tests found these residents’ yards were over the limit.

But the city said that according to EPA rules, it can’t rely on testing by the newsrooms or any other groups to drive testing and cleanup decisions.

Peter Olson thought he was one of the lucky ones. His yard was one of thousands that the federal government had dug up and replaced since cleanup began in 1999. But a Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica soil test conducted in September showed he had too much of the toxic metal in the yard. When his wife contacted the EPA, Olson hoped a federal employee would offer another test and cleanup.

Instead, all the agency could do was examine a small area in the backyard where a deck once stood, according to an email Olson shared from an EPA project manager for the site. The rest of the yard, including an area that was high for lead in the news organizations’ tests, was ineligible, the agency said without explaining why.

The city told Mary Royers it could test her soil because a shed had been demolished and a garage had been built in her backyard, which could have disturbed or uncovered contaminated soil. Unlike with Olson, the city analyzed the whole yard and agreed to clean up several areas around her house. 

Olson said he and his wife agreed to the more limited testing the EPA offered them, though they worry about what might be in the rest of their yard. They’re currently waiting for the testing.

Omahans’ dirt generally qualifies for cleanup if it has more than 400 parts per million of lead in it — about the equivalent of a marble dispersed in a 10-gallon bucket of soil. The EPA adopted that standard in 2009. To date, contractors have dug up and replaced nearly 14,000 yards, mostly in a 27-square-mile area on the city’s east side, which has been declared a federal Superfund site. In 2015, the agency handed over remaining remediation work to Omaha.

Asked about the different responses residents have received, EPA spokesperson Kellen Ashford said in an email that each property is unique, and new sampling depends heavily on whether site conditions have changed because of construction or demolition that might have disturbed or exposed the soil.

“EPA strives to be fair and equitable in its decision-making process while adjusting to changes in agency policies, funding, and cleanup approaches,” he said.

Steve Zivny, who leads Omaha’s Lead Information Office, also said these decisions are made on a case-by-case basis. The city is able to test and clean up within the site but must seek approval from the EPA before doing any work outside those boundaries. The city is paid with settlement money from the smelter and other polluters.

Recently, the city sent letters to some residents outside the boundaries of the Superfund site saying they needed cleanup but reversed course after the EPA said the homes would not qualify, Zivny said.

Amy Haney lives about a half-mile outside the site’s western edge, a boundary the EPA drew by estimating where only a small percentage of homes were likely to have high lead levels. As a result, Haney’s home was never tested. But a Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica test found it had nearly 1.5 times the level that would qualify for a lead cleanup. 

The result felt like a “kick in the gut,” she said. The news organizations tested 35 properties within a three-quarter-mile radius of Haney’s home. Four, including Haney’s house, were above the cleanup level.

Haney contacted the city, which told her the EPA would retest her home this summer.

While the EPA has cleaned up homes outside the site in the past, Ashford said any sampling beyond the site’s bounds right now is for investigative purposes only, and those homeowners may not be eligible for remediation. 

The agency’s priority is cleaning up within the Superfund site as well as properties that impact children, he said.

Even when kids test high for lead, however, the city and the EPA don’t always retest yards.

Sabrina, a north Omaha resident whose soil we tested, said doctors found lead in three of her children. (She asked that her last name not be published to protect their identities.) In 2020, after her daughter’s blood-lead test, the city and a nonprofit replaced windows that contained lead-based paint. But they didn’t test the yard.

The only information Sabrina said she received about the dirt was the EPA test results from 2003 that showed the yard didn’t qualify for cleanup.

“I felt like that was kind of a lazy response,” Sabrina said. Despite the window replacements, doctors have found lead in her other kids’ blood.

The Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica tested her soil in May and found the lead was over the cleanup level and twice as high as the EPA’s 2003 test records showed. 

Sabrina requested a new test, but the city denied it, saying no work had been done on the property and it couldn’t rely on the newsrooms’ results. 

Zivny said the city has asked the EPA to revisit that decision in light of her children’s blood test results.

The post Lead Contamination Is Still a Problem in Omaha. Why Is the City Cleaning Up Some Yards and Not Others? appeared first on ProPublica.

Decades after the last plume of lead-laced smoke rose from a smelting plant in Omaha, Nebraska, the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica found lead in concentrations that pose a threat to people’s health in soil throughout east Omaha. 

Our investigation began more than two years ago, when Leah Keinama, who previously worked for a food security nonprofit, could not find up-to-date information about lead contamination for gardeners in Omaha. Keinama, now the director of civic journalism at the Nebraska Journalism Trust, and reporters at the Flatwater Free Press knew about the city’s refining history, so they teamed up to find out whether concerns about lead exposure were still warranted all these years later.  

The Environmental Protection Agency declared a 27-square-mile area within the city a hazardous waste zone, known as a Superfund site, after the American Smelting and Refining Company closed in the 1990s. That prompted a lengthy period of testing and remediation. Today, unless Omaha residents pay for private testing, there aren’t many avenues to find out how much lead is in their soil if their property had been tested by the city and EPA in the past.

A Community-Informed Investigation 

Throughout our reporting, we heard from hundreds of Omaha residents who said they didn’t know about the city’s lead history. Some said they believed that because the EPA had already cleaned up thousands of properties that had high concentrations of lead in the soil, there was nothing to worry about. 

Our goal was to reach people in every neighborhood in and around the Superfund site. So we knocked on doors, hung up flyers around town, visited a community health center, attended multiple events, partnered with local libraries, and spoke to a college classroom to invite people to sign up for free soil testing. We also posted our online form in various social media channels and shared the news with other local media. We made our reporting available in Spanish, as roughly 10% of residents living within the Superfund site don’t speak English.

Flatwater Free Press initially partnered with local libraries and a community-based organization to distribute do-it-yourself kits with instructions on how to collect a soil sample. We received fewer than 100 samples using this method before switching to a sign-up system in which residents indicated they wanted our team to collect soil from their yard.

After a resident signed up for testing, a member of the reporting team (usually Keinama or Flatwater Free Press reporter Chris Bowling) went to their home, put on latex gloves, wiped down a stainless steel spoon with an unscented wipe and scooped about 3 to 4 tablespoons of soil from the middle of the yard into a sealable vial. We made sure not to collect samples too close to the house or too close to the road, which the EPA has found can be overly contaminated by paint or the remnants of leaded gasoline, respectively. When demand for testing increased, we hired two part-time soil collectors.

We sent labeled samples to Accurate Analytical Testing, an EPA-accredited lab, for $10 per test. Once we received the results from the lab, we informed residents (unless they had opted out of receiving their result) and put together a guide to answer some of their top questions. 

Our soil collection process differed from the EPA’s method of taking multiple composite samples from five sections of the yard. We chose to take a single sample from one area of each yard to reach more people and keep costs reasonable. In a few cases, we took multiple samples from the same yard and tested each sample individually but used only the highest result for our analysis.

The EPA said sampling a single area “can be strongly biased high or low” compared to composite sampling. However, several of the nine environmental contamination experts we spoke to said single samples can offer broad conclusions about contamination in an area when enough are collected, which several experts felt we had achieved. Some said our sampling would likely underestimate contamination on a property. 

Other experts said our testing method would not accurately depict lead levels across a particular yard because of how variable the contamination can be. At the same time, experts also told us the EPA’s method of gathering multiple composite samples can still miss hot spots or underestimate contamination. 

What We Found

Over the past two years, we used the EPA’s sampling protocol as guidance to collect soil from 620 homes in and just outside of the Omaha Superfund site. (We’re continuing to collect samples from the nearby cities of Bellevue, Nebraska; Carter Lake, Iowa; and Council Bluffs, Iowa.)

We matched each home at which we took a soil sample with Omaha’s lead registry, which includes details like the address’ remediation status and results of the EPA’s testing, and compared our test results with historic data. Some homes that had previously undergone the EPA’s remediation process had high levels of lead contamination, our analysis found.  

• We tested 150 previously remediated yards. One in 10 of those yards’ results came back with a concentration greater than 400 parts per million, the level the EPA used to decide which yards to clean up.
• Nearly all of the previously remediated yards that tested above 400 parts per million are within 100 yards of another property that originally tested above the EPA cleanup threshold but was never remediated. A third had two such neighboring properties. That proximity could mean that the previously cleaned-up yards we tested were recontaminated by properties where the soil was never replaced, one expert said.
• Many of the 241 homes we tested within the Superfund site that had never been remediated also showed high levels of lead. Of those homes, 1 in 20 had a concentration higher than 400 parts per million, according to our test results.
• Across Omaha, 41% of the 620 yards we tested had more than 100 parts per million in their soil sample, a level that an EPA model shows could cause high blood-lead levels in children. Within the Superfund site, more than half of the almost 390 yards we tested had more than 100 parts per million. 

Our testing shows that lead contamination at levels that pose a risk to residents’ health is fairly widespread — even in sites that the EPA previously addressed.

Throughout our reporting, we spoke to nine experts in environmental and lead contamination to make sense of our findings. Several said the EPA should do more testing and possibly cleanup in Omaha.

We asked the EPA about our findings. The agency said it will work with the city of Omaha to “investigate the outcomes you have noted” and work with the city and property owners to take corrective action if needed in accordance with 2009 cleanup guidelines.

The post The EPA Doesn’t Typically Retest Homes in the Country’s Largest Residential Lead Superfund Site. So We Did. appeared first on ProPublica.

Shortly after buying her house in 2022, Mary Royers learned from a man across the street that her Omaha, Nebraska, neighborhood was contaminated with lead. But her yard, like thousands of others, had been cleaned up, the neighbor said.

Royers wanted to be sure. So the 36-year-old educator checked a website where the city tracks the soil test results of every home in a 27-square-mile area surrounding the site of an old lead smelter. She saw “remediated” written in bright green letters. The federal government had completed the work two decades ago. An expert must have tested the dirt and determined the problem was solved, she thought.

Relieved, Royers set about sowing the garden of her dreams. Hours disappeared as she thrust her hands into the soil, tearing up the grass and planting purple coneflower for bees to harvest and prairie grass to sway in the breeze.

“You have the green light from the city. That means everything’s safe,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘Thank God I don’t have to worry about that.’”

But a soil test conducted last fall by the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica found otherwise: Royers’ yard still has more than 1.5 times the level of lead that the Environmental Protection Agency’s cleanup was supposed to have eliminated.

Reading the emailed results, she felt “gut-wrenching disbelief,” she said.

“All I could think about was the dirt under my nails and all over my face,” said Royers, who has largely given up gardening for now. She explained later, “It felt like a betrayal of that trust.”

Since 1999, the EPA has spent $273 million digging up and backfilling nearly 14,000 yards across east Omaha to address contamination left from the smelter and other factories downtown. It’s the largest residential lead cleanup in the country. And the agency’s Superfund program has repeatedly heralded it as a success.

But, it turns out, Omaha’s soil might not be as safe as officials have advertised. The news organizations tested soil from more than 600 properties, including 150 that the EPA said had been cleaned up. In those tests, 1 in 10 yards marked as remediated still had enough lead to qualify for cleanup under the original guidelines. And nearly a quarter of the properties we tested in east Omaha could qualify for further study under new guidance released by the Trump administration last fall.

The results suggest the EPA has more work to do, said Howard Mielke, a longtime researcher of lead-contaminated soil who’s considered one of the field’s foremost experts. Not only should the agency clean up the areas that tested above the remediation level, he said, but it also should test other homes.

“If you find a couple of high results, chances are many high results will be nearby,” said Mielke, an adjunct professor at the Tulane University School of Medicine.

Some experts and environmental advocates said our findings reflect weaknesses in the EPA’s approach to cleaning up residential lead sites, which can leave a lot of lead behind.

Jeff Tittel, former director of the Sierra Club in New Jersey, the state with the most Superfund sites, said he repeatedly watched the EPA declare its work done after wrongly assuming everything had been cleaned up.

“On paper, everything’s wonderful,” he said, “but at the sites, there’s still chaos.”

The EPA declined an interview request with senior officials overseeing the Omaha cleanup.

In an emailed response, spokesperson Kellen Ashford said the EPA is committed to cleaning up contaminated sites to protect residents and the environment. “The diligent cleanup efforts have led to a dramatic decrease in elevated blood lead levels” in Omaha, he said. (While the percentage of kids testing high for lead has dropped significantly, as it has nationally, kids in the Omaha site still test high for lead at rates above the national average.)

Ashford said the EPA could not assess the news organizations’ results without further investigation, but property owners can reach out to the EPA or the city of Omaha, which now manages the site for the federal government, if they have concerns.

“Because it would not be possible to completely remove all lead,” Ashford said, the EPA and the city also try to educate the community about lead risks and precautions.

The city is already responding to the news organization’s findings.

The day after receiving her results, Royers forwarded them to the city’s lead office, asking if anything could be done. An employee tested her dirt and found even higher levels than the news organizations did. The city plans to clean the yard up again in August, Royers said.

But the EPA and the city have refused to clean up or test properties of others who have reached out about their high lead results.

The agency has also not said what it plans to do about properties that are below the current cleanup level but above President Donald Trump’s new screening level, which could prompt further action. Any update would come after a new site study the agency plans to release in October 2027, Ashford said.

Royers and her partner, Stephen Matthews, are thankful for the new cleanup, but they wonder: How many other Omahans may be misled or unaware about lead contamination in their yards?

“We’re one house out of thousands,” Matthews said.

What Might Have Gone Wrong

It’s difficult to identify why some cleaned-up properties still test high for lead.

That’s in part because Omaha’s lead problem is almost as old as the city itself. The American Smelting and Refining Company produced lead to make batteries, cover cables and enrich gasoline for more than a century. After the smelter closed in 1997, the EPA estimated the plant and other factories had dumped 200,000 tons of lead dust — enough to fill at least 1,600 rail cars — across Omaha’s east side.

At the time, the Superfund program, which had started only a decade before, was still trying to figure out how to clean up residential sites like Omaha’s, then home to 125,000 people. Old factory sites could be bulldozed and excavated, the contaminated material carted away. But the Omaha site involved people’s homes and yards.

The agency tested nearly every yard in east Omaha and came up with a plan: It would dig up and replace parts of yards that had a concentration of more than 400 parts per million of lead — the equivalent of a marble in a 10-pound bucket of dirt.

But that meant that some properties were cleaned up while neighboring ones that had only slightly lower levels of lead were not.

Hewing to that kind of strict standard doesn’t make sense, said Gabriel Filippelli, an Indiana University earth sciences professor and longtime lead researcher.

“From a scientific standpoint, a 390 is the same as a 410,” Filippelli said. “It’s the same as a 400. They’re all about the same value.”

Failing to clean up neighboring properties can also lead to recontamination over time. When it’s windy and the ground is dry, tiny lead particles in the dirt — generally about one-hundredth the width of a human hair — become airborne and spread, Filippelli said.

When the Superfund program started, the agency cleaned an entire yard if its average lead level among multiple samples was over the limit.

But by the time the Omaha cleanup started, the method had changed. In Omaha, it divided yards into five sections: two in the backyard, two in the front yard and a thin ring around the home’s perimeter called the dripline, which often contains the most contaminated dirt but can also contain remnants of lead paint.

The agency took multiple samples per section of yard and replaced a section’s soil only if the average was over 400 parts per million. This approach could lead them to miss hot spots or leave behind areas that have high lead levels but are just under the cleanup threshold. Contractors also did not dig up the driplines if another part of the yard wasn’t over the limit.

This could explain why the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica’s testing found that about 1 in 20 homes that didn’t qualify for cleanup originally now tested above the cleanup threshold. In addition, the news outlets found several properties outside the Superfund site that were over the limit.

In the early days of the cleanup, Don Preister, a longtime Omaha lead advocate and former state senator, argued for the EPA to clean up entire yards and to lower the level of lead that would qualify for remediation, calling the agency’s solution a half-measure.

But the EPA decided that its approach made the most of limited money and prioritized the highest-risk areas. One EPA manager told Omahans in 2004 that the choice to remove only sections of yards was “economical,” according to meeting records.

“It brought out feelings of hurt,” Preister said of the EPA’s choice. “Children are likely to still be impacted, and their health affected.”

The EPA’s national guidelines did advise against “‘patchwork clean-up’ patterns which are prone to recontamination” when adjacent sections are high. But the agency didn’t give clear guidance on how to implement that, several former site managers said, and some felt they had to follow the rules strictly or risk violating federal law or agreements with companies paying to clean up their pollution.

Ashford acknowledged that the agency has to adhere strictly to its cleanup plans but said in some cases, like an industrial site near a residential area, the EPA may clean up to a lower level to prevent recontamination.

Another problem was that east Omaha was full of older homes that contained lead paint that could recontaminate cleaned soil over time. Following local pressure, the EPA agreed to test homes’ paint. If it contained lead, the agency repainted the outside. But the EPA did not repaint houses whose soil did not also qualify for cleanup. Studies in urban areas have found homes with deteriorating paint have contaminated nearby gardens.

Ashford said an EPA study found most lead-based paint contamination in Omaha was within 6 feet of the house.

Brenda González Rocha, who has lived in her south Omaha home since 2020, thinks both soil and paint are to blame for the lead that doctors found in her 4-year-old daughter’s blood. Her basement had lead paint, which she hired a company to fix.

But although the EPA cleaned up her yard in 2012, the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica tests found levels of lead that are higher than before the agency remediated it. González is surrounded by properties with lingering lead. A yard down the street that had high lead levels was never remediated. The banks of the nearby highway were never dug up and replaced. The house next door has lead paint on it, according to the city lead website.

Ashford said it’s unlikely that wind-blown dust from one house to another would recontaminate cleaned areas with enough lead to surpass the cleanup level.

But nearly all the remediated properties the newsrooms tested that were over the cleanup threshold are within 100 yards of a property that originally qualified for remediation but wasn’t cleaned up. A third had two such neighboring properties.

González’s eight kids, between 8 months and 22 years old, love to play outside. They jump on the trampoline, ride bikes and play soccer. Now González is anxious whenever they’re in the yard.

“I worry that this could affect their quality of life,” she said. “I would feel bad if something happened to them during their development. I would feel responsible.”

“Benign Neglect”

Once the EPA chooses a fix for a Superfund site, it is generally required to review the site every five years to update the public on the progress of the cleanup. But the ways those reviews are done leave unanswered questions about whether the solution is working and how much lead is in Omaha today, said experts who examined the reports for the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica.

In their reviews, government officials in Omaha track how intact the grass is on top of the new soil. If it is exposed or has been disturbed, it could be a sign that any remaining lead is no longer safely underground and could blow around.

But they don’t retest a representative sample of properties.

Cleanups often take several tries to get right, said Tittel, the former New Jersey Sierra Club director, and recontamination or missed contamination can be a huge problem.

Tittel said he has seen similar patterns in New Jersey. In 1979, Tittel helped show EPA employees where the Ford Motor Company dumped industrial waste into abandoned mine pits. Since then, he has seen the mess declared a Superfund site, marked safe, become a Superfund site again and spawn a lawsuit that Ford settled in 2009 as locals continued discovering more hazards.

“It’s sort of a benign neglect when it comes to these sites,” Tittel said. “Government just wants to get it over with because it’s taking so long. They end up cutting corners or looking the other way.”

A Ford spokesperson said the company takes its environmental responsibility seriously and has been working with state and federal officials to clean up the site.

Retesting soil does not appear to be standard at other sites, according to reviews examined by the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica. But it should be, said Debbie Chizewer, a managing attorney with the environmental law group Earthjustice. Without ongoing testing, the EPA can’t really know if its solution is working, she said, and residents won’t know how toxins in the environment are impacting their health.

“I think for the five-year review to be meaningful, you need to do testing,” she said.

Ashford said the EPA retests properties on a case-by-case basis, such as when construction disturbs the soil. The periodic reviews, which in Omaha have led to an ongoing reevaluation of the site’s cleanup level, allow the EPA to ensure these unique, complex sites protect people and the environment over time, he said.

Steve Zivny, who leads Omaha’s Lead Information Office, also said new testing and cleanup decisions depend on factors such as whether kids live at the home and whether they have tested for a high lead exposure.

The EPA’s reviews of the Omaha site do point to some potential problems. In 2024, inspectors found 98% of the lawns had been disturbed, indicating a risk that buried lead could be exposed. That includes having weeds, bare soil or demolished buildings. But the EPA tested only 32 sites where homes had been demolished and found six exceeded the cleanup level. To them, that indicated the solution was “generally protective; however, more data should be collected to support this conclusion,” according to the report.

Those figures, however, trouble Ian von Lindern, who oversaw lead cleanup at an Idaho Superfund site for more than 30 years. He doesn’t doubt the federal government did a good job hauling away tons of toxins in Omaha. But he’s sure they couldn’t get all of it.

At the Idaho site, the EPA requires people to request permits from a local health district before digging in their yards. Local health employees can also test residents’ dirt, and, if it’s above the cleanup level, it may qualify for further remediation.

Without someone keeping a close eye on the fixes, recontamination can occur as people dig up lead-contaminated soil or unremediated soil is allowed to blow around.

“Those remedies are, I don’t want to use the word failing, but they’re becoming less effective,” he said.

Royers worries many homes in Omaha fit that description.

This summer, the educator is letting the weeds grow freely in her garden. Pretty soon, the city is going to replace it anyway.

The thought makes her feel guilty. More people should know about potential lead in their yard and have access to tests and cleanups. But that would require acknowledging that after decades and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, there are cracks in the cleanup. Royers isn’t sure that will happen.

“The priority is pretending like things are OK,” she said. “Clearly it’s not.”

The post The EPA Spent Millions Cleaning Up a Massive Superfund Site. Our Tests Found Toxic Levels of Lead in Many Yards. appeared first on ProPublica.