Do You Live in the Omaha and Council Bluffs Area?
Sign Up for Free Lead Testing of Your Soil.
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.
For more than a century, a smelting plant in downtown Omaha, Nebraska, spewed lead-laced smoke across the city. As the toxic metal drifted toward the ground, approximately 400 million pounds of it — nearly the weight of Chicago’s Willis Tower — settled into the soil and bodies of countless Omahans. Since 1999, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the city of Omaha have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to clean it up.
Flatwater Free Press is partnering with ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative newsroom, to find out how effective they’ve been and see what questions are still out there about one of the largest residential environmental cleanups in America.
To date, we’ve collected soil samples of more than 600 properties in and around the Superfund site. We are now turning our attention to homes just outside of the designated Superfund site, testing properties in Council Bluffs, Iowa; Carter Lake, Iowa; and the northern part of Bellevue, Nebraska. Those communities were not included in the federal cleanup because the EPA said it did not find high enough contamination there, but emails and other records obtained by Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica show that in 2025, the EPA was discussing with local officials whether to expand the cleanup area to other parts of Omaha and the surrounding area.
We will prioritize collecting soil from within Bellevue (north of Cornhusker Road and east of 36th Street), Carter Lake and Council Bluffs (west of 16th Street).
If you live within the Omaha Superfund site and your property was remediated, we are also interested in testing your soil. You can find out if your property was remediated by searching Omaha’s Lead Registry.
Sign up to have your soil tested for lead by filling out our form. If you live in one of the areas listed above, a member of our team may come collect a soil sample from your yard. Once it’s tested, we will inform you of your results. (You may opt out of receiving the test results if you prefer.)
If you have any questions, please contact Flatwater Free Press reporter Chris Bowling at [email protected] or 402-302-0066, Ext. 5. We invite you to share this form with your neighbors and community so they can sign up to have their soil tested for lead, too.
Omaha Lead Superfund Site map
This map shows the Omaha Lead Superfund Site. Flatwater Free Press is interested in testing properties within the site as well as those in surrounding areas like neighborhoods east of 72nd Street, Bellevue, Carter Lake and Council Bluffs. We will prioritize collecting soil from within these neighborhoods.