The county health worker scanned the Omaha home with an X-ray gun, searching for the poison. 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…
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