The EPA Heralds Its Omaha Cleanup as a Success. But We Found Many Yards Still Have Toxic Levels of Lead.

Reporting Highlights Over the Limit: One in 10 Omaha yards we tested that the EPA cleaned up still has enough lead in the dirt to be over the agency’s threshold. Nearby Toxins: Nearly all previously remediated homes the news organizations’ testing found to have excessive levels had a neighbor whose yard tested high but was never cleaned up. New Levels: Nearly a quarter of east Omaha yards we tested surpass a new lead level set by Trump’s EPA that could trigger more cleanup. These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story. 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. Series Timeline Oct. 20, 2025 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.December 2015 The EPA finished the cleanup of more than 13,000 residential properties and passed the remaining work to the city of Omaha.March 1999 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. 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.” Mary Royers washes her hands in her kitchen after being outside in her garden. She has largely stopped gardening after a Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica soil test found high levels of lead contamination. Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica 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. Stephen Matthews, Royers’ partner, in their wildflower garden. Though the soil outside their home was remediated years ago, a recent test by Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica indicated a high level of lead. Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica 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.