This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Flatwater Free Press.
The county health worker scanned the Omaha home with an X-ray gun, searching for the poison.
Tens of thousands of Omahans have lead in their yards at levels that experts say is dangerous, especially for kids. Growing momentum to do more cleanup in what’s already the nation’s largest residential lead Superfund site now may stall.
Chris Bowling, Flatwater Free Press
PublishedDec 14, 2025TopicClimate + AccountabilityShare/RepublishCopy Link
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network
It was 2022, and doctors had recently found high levels of lead in the blood of Crystalyn Prine’s 2-year-old son, prompting the Douglas County Health Department to investigate. The worker said it didn’t seem to come from the walls, where any lead would be buried under layers of smooth paint. The lead assessor swabbed the floors for dust but didn’t find answers as to how Prine’s son had been exposed.
A danger did lurk outside, the worker told her. For more than a century, a smelter and other factories had spewed lead-laced smoke across the city’s east side, leading the federal government to declare a huge swath of Omaha a Superfund site and to dig up and replace nearly 14,000 yards — including about a third of the east side’s residential properties — since 1999.
Prine looked up the soil tests for her home online and discovered her yard contained potentially harmful levels of lead. But when she called the city, officials told her that her home didn’t qualify for government-funded cleanup under the standard in place from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Prine didn’t want to move out of the home that had been in her husband’s family for generations. So she followed the county’s advice to keep her five kids safe. They washed their hands frequently and took off their shoes when they came inside.
Then, Prine heard some news at the clinic where she worked as a nurse that gave her hope: In January 2024, the EPA under President Joe Biden lowered the lead levels that could trigger cleanup. Her home was above the new threshold.
That didn’t automatically mean her yard would be cleaned up, local officials told her, but last year, the EPA began to study the possibility of cleaning up tens of thousands of more yards in Omaha, according to emails and other records obtained by the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica. The agency was also discussing with local officials whether to expand the cleanup area to other parts of Omaha and its surrounding suburbs.
Then, this October, the Trump administration rolled back the Biden administration’s guidance. In doing so, it tripled the amount of lead that had to be in the soil to warrant a potential cleanup, meaning that Prine and other families might again be out of luck.
Prine’s son Jack, now 5, struggles to speak. He talks less than his 2-year-old brother and stumbles over five-word sentences.
“You would think that if lead is this impactful on a small child, that you would definitely want to be fixing it,” she said. “What do you do as a parent? I don’t want to keep my kid from playing outside. He loves playing outside, and I should be able to do that in my own yard.”
Scientists have long agreed about the dangers of lead. The toxic metal can get into kids’ brains and nervous systems, causing IQ loss and developmental delays. Experts say the Trump administration’s guidance runs counter to decades of research: In the 26 years since the government began to clean up east Omaha — the largest residential lead Superfund site in the country — scientists have found harm at ever lower levels of exposure.
Yet what gets cleaned up is often not just a matter of science but also money and government priorities, according to experts who have studied the Superfund program.
Prine’s block illustrates how widespread Omaha’s lead problem is and how many people who might have benefited from the Biden guidance may no longer get relief. Of the 11 homes on her block, four were cleaned up by the EPA. Six others tested below the original cleanup standard but above the levels in the Biden guidance and were never remediated.
The Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica are embarking on a yearlong project about Omaha’s lead legacy, including testing soil to find out how effective the cleanup has been. If you live in or near the affected area, you can sign up for free lead testing of your soil.
Despite the changing guidance, Omaha still follows a cleanup standard set in 2009: Properties qualify for cleanup if parts of the yard have more than 400 parts per million of lead in the soil — the equivalent of a marble in a 10-pound bucket of dirt. The Biden administration lowered the guidance for so-called removal management levels to 200 parts per million.
The Trump administration has said its new guidance, which raised them to 600 parts per million, would speed cleanups by providing clearer direction and streamlining investigations of contaminated sites. But environmental advocates said it only accelerates project completion by cleaning up fewer properties.
The EPA disputed that. “Protecting communities from lead exposure at contaminated sites is EPA’s statutory responsibility and a top priority for the Trump EPA,” the agency said in a statement. “The criticism that our Residential Soil Lead Directive will result in EPA doing less is false.”
The new guidance doesn’t necessarily scrap the hopes of Omaha homeowners or the conversations that were happening around the Biden recommendations. That’s because the Trump administration continues to allow EPA managers to study properties with lower levels of lead, depending on how widespread the contamination is and how likely people are to be harmed. What actually gets cleaned up is decided by local EPA officials, who can set remediation levels higher or lower based on the circumstances of specific sites.
Regional EPA spokesperson Kellen Ashford said the agency is continuing to assess the Omaha site and will meet with local and state leaders to “chart a path forward with how the updated residential lead directive may apply.”
Gabriel Filippelli, executive director of Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute, has studied lead and Superfund sites for decades and said he is doubtful the EPA will spend the money to clean up more yards in Omaha. The EPA doesn’t act if “you don’t have local people raising alarm bells,” he said.
Yet in Omaha, many are unaware of the debate — or even the presence of lead in their yards. Most of the cleanup happened more than a decade ago. As years passed, new people moved in, and younger residents never learned about the site. Others who did know assumed the lead problem was solved. The dustup around lead has mostly settled even if much of the toxic metal in the city’s dirt never left.
‘Mass poison’
When Prine moved into Omaha’s Field Club neighborhood in 2018, she loved the Queen Anne and Victorian-style homes that lined shady boulevards and how her neighbors decorated heavily for Halloween and Christmas.