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

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" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="177933" data-entity-type="organization">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. An Omaha lead smelter spread dust that seeped into the soil and bodies of many residents. The EPA spent decades cleaning up the surrounding area — but not Council Bluffs, Carter Lake or Bellevue. 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. We published a guide to inform the public about what they should know about lead contamination in Omaha. We reported that despite Omaha being home to the largest residential lead Superfund site in the country, most kids living there aren’t tested for the toxic metal. The Trump administration issued guidance tripling the amount of lead that has to be in soil to warrant potential cleanup. Before that, the EPA had been discussing expanding the Omaha cleanup, which could have included nearly 27,000 properties. The Flatwater Free Press in partnership with ProPublica began testing Omaha yards for lead to find out how effective the cleanup has been. The EPA finished the cleanup of more than 13,000 residential properties and passed the remaining work to the city of Omaha. The Environmental Protection Agency began testing soil from Omaha yards after concerns about elevated blood lead levels in children. The contamination was eventually tied to a smelter and factories that spewed lead dust for over a century. 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.