This story was originally published by Verite News
This four-month investigation was supported by a Kozik Environmental Justice Reporting grant funded by the National Press Foundation and the National Press Club Journalism Institute. It was also produced as a project for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship Fund and the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.
Sarah Hess started taking her toddler, Josie, to Mickey Markey Playground in 2010 because she thought it would be a safe place to play after Josie had been diagnosed with lead poisoning.
Hess had traced the problem to the crumbling paint in her family’s century-old home. While it underwent lead remediation, the family stayed in a newer, lead-free house in the Bywater neighborhood near Markey, where Josie regularly played on the swings and slides.
“Everyone was telling us the safest place to play was outside at playgrounds, so that’s where we went,” Hess said.
Josie’s next blood test was a shock. “It skyrocketed,” Hess said. Josie’s lead levels had leapt to nearly five times the national health standard.
When the soil at Markey was tested in late 2010, it too was found to have dangerously high levels of lead. But the city took no meaningful action to inform Markey’s users or make the park safe. Parents started posting warning signs at the park and flooded City Hall with outraged calls and emails. Holding Josie in her arms, Hess made an impassioned speech to the City Council.
In short order, the city had hired a company to test Markey and other parks, and pledged to fix the lead problem wherever it was found.
“I couldn’t have been more pleased,” Hess said. “They were totally into it. My impression was they were going to make them all lead-free parks.
But a Verite News investigation conducted over four months in 2025 found that lead pollution in New Orleans parks not only persists, it is more widespread than previously known. Dozens of city parks with playgrounds remain unsafe, including Markey and others that underwent city-sponsored lead remediation in 2011. The city does not appear to have conducted any major remediation or lead testing of parks since that time.
The findings indicate that city officials fell short in their cleanup efforts then, and that a very large number of New Orleans children are exposed to excessive amounts of lead now, said Howard Mielke, a retired Tulane University toxicologist and one of the nation’s leading experts on lead contamination.
“It’s a failed program,” he said. “They didn’t do what they needed to do to bring the lead levels down in a single park.”
Verite News reporters tested hundreds of soil samples from 84 city parks with playgrounds in fall 2025. Adrienne Katner, a lead contamination researcher with Louisiana State University, verified the results. The testing found that about half the parks had lead concentrations that exceed a federal hazard level established in 2024 for soil in urban areas.
“I am surprised they haven’t been tested and mitigated,” said Gabriel Filippelli, an Indiana University biochemist who studies lead exposure. “If there’s evidence of kids playing in soils that are as high as [Verite’s testing] described, that’s kind of horrifying.”
Public health researchers and doctors say that children under 6 absorb lead-laden dust more easily than adults, contaminating their blood and harming the long-term development of their brains and nervous systems. There is no known safe exposure level for children, and even trace amounts can result in behavioral problems and lower cognitive abilities.
New Orleans is in financial straits with a budget deficit of about $220 million, and it’s unclear what priority or resources Mayor Helena Moreno will, or even can, allocate to restart lead remediation efforts. In response to the financial crisis, Moreno has eliminated dozens of positions and plans to furlough 700 employees one day per pay period to save money. Moreno’s administration did not respond to requests for comment.
The city doesn’t routinely test for lead in parks, said Larry Barabino, chief executive officer of the New Orleans Recreation Development (NORD) Commission, the agency that oversees most of the city’s parklands. He confirmed the last significant effort to test parks ended in 2011.
He called Verite’s results “definitely concerning” and pledged to work with city departments and local experts to potentially remediate unsafe parks.
“Safety is our number one priority here at NORD,” Barabino said. “If there’s anything that’s a true environmental concern or risk, that’s something that we believe in definitely making sure we take action.”
Andrea Young heard similar pledges 14 years ago. Like Hess, Young had a child who frequented Markey and had high lead levels in her blood. The mothers helped form a community group called NOLA Unleaded that pushed the city to clean up Markey and other parks. Young thought they had succeeded, but said she now realizes that the city had not done enough.
“It makes me question the value of the work that (the city) did, and the safety we felt in letting our kids play there again,” Young said with a trembling voice. “It just sort of shakes me up a little bit, you know?”
Testing New Orleans parks
Verite News conducted soil tests on the city parks that property inventories and maps list as having play structures. Samples were taken from surface soil, which is most likely to come into contact with children’s hands and toys or be inhaled when kicked up during play or blown by the wind.
Lead is typically found in very small amounts in natural soil. The average lead abundance in U.S. soils is 26 parts per million, equivalent to less than an ounce of lead per ton of soil.
Soil samples collected by Verite from New Orleans parks averaged about 121 ppm—nearly five times the national average.
How Verite Tested New Orleans Parks:
Two Verite News reporters were trained to use an X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analyzer to test 531 soil samples over a month in late 2025. The XRF is a $30,000 handheld device that can detect the unique traits of lead at trace levels, down to 10 parts per million. The analyzer is widely used by government and university scientists.
The reporters tested 531 soil samples over a month in late 2025, following protocols developed by retired Tulane University toxicologist Howard Mielke and vetted by three other lead-contamination researchers. The reporters tested surface soil in and around play structures and other areas of parks that children use. Of the more than 110 parks in New Orleans, Verite concentrated on the 84 that city property inventories and maps list as having play structures. The reporters collected between three and 11 samples at each park, depending on the size, site accessibility, and levels of contamination. A GPS device was used to record each sample’s location.
Verite’s results were reviewed by Adrienne Katner, a lead-contamination researcher at Louisiana State University. She verified the testing’s accuracy by comparing it with a smaller set of park soil samples collected by her team last summer. Due to the limitations of Verite’s sampling method, the results can’t be used to describe the state of a whole park. But they provide a starting point for city officials to conduct more comprehensive testing that could guide remediation.
The federal hazard level for lead in soil was 400 ppm until early 2024, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under President Joe Biden lowered it to 200 ppm for most residential areas and 100 ppm in areas like New Orleans with multiple sources of lead exposure, including contaminated soil, lead paint and large numbers of lead pipes.
More of a guide than a mandate, the EPA screening levels can steer federal cleanup actions and are often adopted by state and city governments to inform local responses to lead contamination.
California has long had a much lower standard of 80 ppm. Of the New Orleans parks Verite tested, 52 – or about two-thirds – had results that fail California’s standard.
In October, President Donald Trump’s administration rolled back the EPA screening standards. The administration retained the 200 ppm threshold for residential areas but eliminated the 100 ppm level for areas with multiple lead sources.
The administration didn’t dispute the validity of the 100 ppm threshold, but argued that a single level “reduces inconsistent implementation and provides clarity to decision makers and the public.”
The change, according to Mielke, doesn’t align with the science, which has long shown that children are harmed when exposed to soil with levels below 100 ppm. He was one of several scientists who had pushed for lower thresholds since the EPA established its first screening levels more than 30 years ago.
Mielke said the 100 ppm screening level should still be applied in urban areas, especially New Orleans. The city has a long history of soil contaminated with lead from a combination of sources, including lead-based paint, leaded gasoline and emissions from waste incinerators and other industrial facilities. Lead particles spread easily by wind, eventually settling in the topsoil.
Verite found lead levels above 100 ppm at numerous places that get heavy use by children. Lead contamination more than four times that level was recorded near the slides at Markey, outside a playhouse in Brignac Park near Magazine Street and at a well-worn spot under an oak tree at Desmare Park in Bayou St. John.
Elevated lead levels tended to follow the age of the neighborhood. The city’s older neighborhoods, including the Irish Channel and Algiers Point, had some of the highest lead levels, while Gentilly and New Orleans East, which were developed mostly after the 1950s, tended to be lower, according to Verite’s findings.
The highest lead levels were found at Evans Park in the Freret neighborhood. Beside a low-hanging oak branch, on ground worn bare by children’s play, Verite recorded lead at 5,998 ppm, nearly 60 times the urban soils threshold.
Verite spoke to more than a dozen parents at playgrounds across the city, and most were surprised at the levels of lead in the parks.
In the Irish Channel, Meg Potts watched her son run around the dusty playground at Brignac. All of Verite’s samples at the park surpassed the threshold the EPA deemed safe for urban areas, reaching nearly 600 ppm.
Potts knew high lead levels existed in the city, but didn’t realize her neighborhood park could be a source of exposure for her son.
“ I’m just thinking about all of this now because he’s had to go in and have his lead tested,” she said. “He’s like right on the cusp of having too high lead.”
The invisibility of lead makes it challenging for parents to manage among other priorities. Meghan Stroh, whose children often play at Markey, said it’s hard for parents to protect their children from every threat, but tackling lead at parks is one way the city could help.
“It’s a concern that I have amidst a myriad of others,” she said while holding her 10-month-old daughter on her hip. “So, it would be nice to have one thing checked off the list.”
Katner, the LSU researcher, said Verite’s results can serve as a starting point for city officials to conduct more comprehensive testing in parks, noting that even a single lead hotspot in a park is concerning.
“ It doesn’t matter where it is in the soil; there’s exposure there,” she said. “The kid playing in that part of the park is going to get the highest dose.”
A legacy of lead
Before the 1970s, lead was nearly everywhere. A 2022 study estimated that the vast majority of the U.S. population born between 1960 and 1980 was poisoned by dangerously high levels of lead in early childhood. On average, lead exposure has resulted in a loss of 2.6 IQ points for more than half the population through 2015.
Lead pollution from cars spread into areas near roads, especially major thoroughfares, until leaded gasoline was phased out by 1996. Similarly, emissions from trash incinerators and industrial sites contaminated the surrounding soil. New Orleans had at least eight incinerators that blew toxic gases and lead dust over several neighborhoods, including Algiers Point and St. Roch, until they were closed in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Today, the most pervasive source of lead in soil is degraded paint. Lead-based paint was used extensively for homes and buildings until it was banned in 1978. In New Orleans, most of the houses were built before 1980, according to the 2024 American Community Survey. As the paint deteriorates, Tulane University epidemiologist Felicia Rabito said it can chip or turn into toxic dust.
“ The leaded paint goes straight into the dust and it goes straight into the soils, which is a major source of exposure for young children in the city,” said Rabito, who studies lead poisoning and other health conditions.
Children under 6 years old are especially vulnerable, in part because they love to stick their hands in their mouths. Rabito stressed that kids don’t have to eat the soil directly to be harmed. Children putting their thumbs in their mouths after playing on a seesaw or eating a dropped Cheerio can be enough.
Even a one-time exposure to contaminated soil can raise the level of lead in a child’s blood, Rabito said. They’re at an even higher risk if they have a calcium deficiency.
”Lead mimics calcium, so the body essentially thinks that the lead is calcium,” Rabito said. After the lead enters the bloodstream, it’s hard to fully remove. Most of it is stored long-term in the body’s bones, accumulating over time and potentially releasing into the bloodstream again later.
Rabito recommended that parents steer clear of contaminated playgrounds because it’s hard to avoid exposure.
The only way to know if a child has lead poisoning is a medical test. By state law,
Louisiana healthcare providers are required to ensure every child between 6 months and 6 years of age receives at least two blood tests by age 1 and age 2.
But the law did not include a way to enforce those testing requirements, so many providers don’t test, according to a 2017 report from the Louisiana Department of Health. The screening rate has always been very low in New Orleans, Rabito said. In 2022, fewer than one in 10 children under 6 years old were screened for lead poisoning in the city, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“ There’s not anything that we can say about lead poisoning or lead levels in children in Orleans Parish with any scientific certainty,” Rabito said. “ As you see from your own testing, there are different pockets of contamination depending upon where you’re playing. Parents really need to get their children tested.”
Limited soil testing, patchy fixes
In 2010, Claudia Copeland joined Hess and other Markey regulars in having their kids tested for lead. One of Copeland’s children, born in Germany, had a blood lead level considered normal at the time. But her younger, New Orleans-born child showed elevated levels that set off alarm bells for Copeland, a molecular biologist.
“There really is no safe level, but it was really bad,” she said.
Copeland hurriedly made signs and posted them around the park. “THE SOIL IN MARKEY PARK IS TOXIC!” they blared in big black letters.
“The city was aware, but they just were not doing anything,” Copeland said. “Parents needed to know. We were all so ignorant about what was in the soil. You know, we’re all saying ‘a little dirt never hurt.’”
Outcry from parents prompted the city to first fence off and padlock Markey, and then promise a more comprehensive response.
The New Orleans health commissioner at the time, Karen DeSalvo, said the city should do “everything we can to understand what the risk might be and to remediate it.” But she also appeared to minimize the dangers of lead at city parks, saying other health risks, like the flu, were greater.
“In the scheme of the many public health challenges that kids have, it’s not the greatest challenge, honestly,” DeSalvo told The Times-Picayune in February 2011.
Then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu was more definitive, pledging a swift, far-reaching action.
“The city will take all necessary measures to investigate possible lead contamination in other parks and playgrounds and remediate them as soon as possible,” he said in March 2011.
Two months later, testing and remediation were completed at several parks. Members of NOLA Unleaded celebrated and brought their kids back to familiar playgrounds.
But Verite’s review of work orders shows that the city’s testing and remediation efforts were limited to a small number of parks. Despite city leaders’ assurances of a broad response, only 16 parks were tested in 2011, according to documents obtained through public records requests.
Mielke and NOLA Unleaded’s members believed most or all of the city’s parks were tested, pointing to Landrieu’s promises and an article in the Atlantic that reported that the city agreed to “test all of the public parks in the city.”
“I guess I kind of believed that, and then you realize that that’s not actually true,” said Young after learning the city’s testing was more limited than she thought. “If the majority of the parks they tested were high (in lead), what would make them think all the others are fine?”
Landrieu did not respond to a request for comment. DeSalvo, who retired last year as Google’s chief health officer, said “extremely limited resources” forced the city to weigh its response to lead contamination with the many other health threats residents faced.
“We worked to address the range of exposures whenever possible with the resources we could muster,” she said.
Of the 16 parks the city tested, only two – A.L. Davis in Central City and Norwood Thompson in Gert Town – had levels below 400 ppm, the federal threshold at the time, and were deemed safe by Materials Management Group, or MMG, which was and still is the city’s environmental consultant. One park, Evans in the Freret neighborhood, was found to have lead levels as high as 610 ppm but wasn’t remediated for reasons not made clear in testing documents and progress reports submitted by MMG. Thirteen parks, including Markey, underwent remediation after testing showed the properties exceeded the 400 ppm threshold that MMG used to determine soil hazard levels.
Fourteen years later, Verite’s testing found A.L. Davis and Norwood Thompson have comparatively low lead levels, although A.L. Davis had one sample slightly above the 100 ppm threshold.
Evans, which did not undergo remediation despite unsafe lead levels in 2011, had the highest lead reading of all soil samples collected by Verite. Alongside a low-hanging oak branch, on ground worn bare by children’s play, Verite recorded lead at 5,998 ppm, a level more than twice that of Verite’s second-highest sample, taken at Soraporu Park in the Irish Channel.
In 2011, MMG recommended remediation at Evans, including installing a fabric layer topped with clean soil in three areas, including the northeast corner where Verite collected the 5,998 ppm sample. MMG noted in a 2015 progress report that it had not performed the work, but the firm did not explain why.
MMG did not respond to requests for comment.
Documents obtained by Verite show that the city’s remediation efforts focused on covering patches of contaminated soil rather than the comprehensive treatment Mielke recommended to city leaders in 2011. Mielke had urged the city to fully cover play areas with clean soil, a strategy his research showed was highly effective in reducing lead exposure.
In 2010, Mielke led an effort to reduce lead exposure at 10 child care center playgrounds in New Orleans. He and his team covered the entire footprint of each playground with water-pervious plastic fabric and then six inches of Mississippi River sediment from the Bonnet Carre Spillway, a source of clean, cheap and easily accessible soil. Lead levels fell, with most playgrounds testing below 10 ppm.
The remediation at city parks also used fabric and soil layers, but the coverings were mostly limited to areas with lead levels above 400 ppm, leaving many hazardous areas exposed. Testing and remediation reports obtained by Verite typically show soil capping in only two or three spots, with most of each park remaining untreated.
The remediation at Comiskey Park in Mid-City, for instance, was limited to a 200-square-foot circle in a soccer field and a 400-square-foot strip along a basketball court. No remediation was done near the playground, where Verite’s testing detected lead levels between 155 ppm and 483 ppm.
At Easton Park in Bayou St. John, the 2011 remediation covered four areas totalling about 4,700 square feet, but the park’s playground was left untouched. Verite measured four samples around the playground that exceeded the 100 ppm threshold, including 1,060 ppm and 603 ppm readings near Easton’s swingset.
The soil cover at Markey was more extensive than in other remediations, stretching across much of the park’s playground and shaded picnic area. But Verite’s testing found high levels of lead in the remediated area, including two samples above 200 ppm and one just above 400 ppm.
“That’s kind of shocking,” Copeland said. “At Markey, the kids play everywhere, and in the sandy areas, they really dig down. I’ve seen holes going almost three feet down, like they’re playing at a beach. They could be getting into contaminated soil and distributing it around.”
Mielke was surprised to learn that the remediation results were far more limited than he recommended. He was blunt in his assessment of the work.
“They worked on too small an area, and they should have been using … large amounts of soil and covering over large areas,” he said.
Hess, a New Orleans native who recently moved to Colorado, said failing to deliver on projects is all too common in New Orleans, a city infamous for chronic dysfunction and mismanagement.
“It’s so sad to have done such a shit job,” she said. “But that’s so New Orleans. I’m sorry. I don’t live there anymore, but it still makes me sad.”
A roadmap for cleanup?
Barabino, the recreation district CEO, said he would share Verite’s results with city project managers and MMG.
“It’s definitely concerning if it’s at the level that’s considered a true risk of threat, and we would get it to (the) capital projects (administration) immediately to get MMG out there, so we could take the steps needed to remediate and make those areas and grounds safe for our kids and families to use,” Barabino said.
Filippelli said the city should conduct comprehensive testing of every park and do regular checkups. But because lead contamination in New Orleans parks is extensive and city leaders are struggling to close a large budget deficit, Filippelli recommends that the city remediate the worst parks first.
He and Mielke don’t believe the city must take the route of full remediation, which involves digging up lead-tainted soil and trucking it to a hazardous-waste landfill. That’s very costly and is usually unnecessary if a park is properly capped with clean soil, Filippelli said.
Verite obtained cost estimates for 10 of the 13 parks targeted for remediation in 2011. The total cost was $83,000 in 2011, or about $120,000 today. The work covered more than 1.3 acres across the 10 properties. Compared with similar remediation efforts described by Mielke and Filippelli, the city’s remediation efforts were very expensive. Filippelli estimates that similar work can be done for about $20,000 per acre — about a fifth of what was spent to remediate just over an acre at New Orleans parks.
Evans, Markey and many other parks with high lead levels have about an acre of open soil or grass that could be capped for about $20,000. Some parks with the biggest lead problems are the smallest in size. Soraporu Park, which scored the second-highest lead levels in Verite’s testing, would need about a half-acre of coverage. Union and Brignac parks, each less than a quarter acre, could be capped for about $5,000, according to Filippelli’s rough estimates.
Remediation should be coupled with efforts to reduce contamination from nearby sources, primarily old houses, Rabito said.
“When you clean up soil, you’re not going to do it much good if you haven’t identified what’s contaminating the soil,” she said. In many cases of recontamination, the culprit was a nearby house that was shedding lead paint.
“Which means the soil was clean for a hot minute before it got recontaminated,” she said. “So, we need to make sure that those homes are cleaned up and maintained in a lead-safe way.”
Cleaning up New Orleans parks will also likely require sustained public pressure, said the parents involved with the lead issue in 2011.
“I was not intending to kick butts or make anybody look bad,” said Copeland of her efforts to alert parents about the dangers at Markey. “But nothing would have happened unless all these parents were calling in to the city.”
