Soil testing inside the country's largest residential lead cleanup site has found contamination at levels high enough to raise children's blood lead, including in yards the federal government marked as remediated two decades ago.
The Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica tested 388 homes within the Omaha Lead Superfund Site and found that 208 of them had soil above 100 parts per million of lead, the level an Environmental Protection Agency risk model indicates would be needed to protect most children under current health guidance. The newsrooms tested more than 600 properties in all, including 150 the EPA said had already been cleaned up. Of those, one in ten still exceeded the federal cleanup level that the work was supposed to eliminate.
