NEW ORLEANS — Sarah Hess started taking her toddler, Josie, to Mickey Markey Playground in 2010 because she thought it would offer a refuge from lead.
After a routine doctor visit revealed Josie had lead poisoning, Hess quickly traced the source to the crumbling paint in her family’s century-old home in the Bayou St. John neighborhood. While it underwent lead remediation, the family stayed in a newer, lead-free house near Markey.
“Everyone was telling us the safest place to play was outside at playgrounds, so that’s where we went,” Hess said. Josie became a Markey regular, playing on the swings and slides.
Josie’s next blood test was a shock. “It skyrocketed,” Hess said. Josie’s lead levels had leaped to nearly five times the national health standard. The likely culprit, according to scientists at the time, was Josie’s favorite park. Soil testing found it had dangerously high levels of lead.
City officials took no action to inform Markey’s users or make the park safe. But parents started posting warning signs at the park and flooded City Hall with calls and emails. With Josie on her hip, Hess made an impassioned speech at a City Council meeting.
In short order, the city hired a company to test Markey and other parks and pledged to fix the lead problem wherever it was found.
“My impression was they were going to make them all lead-free parks,” Hess said.
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 other parks that underwent a city-sponsored lead remediation in 2011.
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, said Howard Mielke, a retired Tulane University toxicologist and one of the nation’s top 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 exceeded the federal hazard level established in 2024 for soil in urban areas.
“If there’s evidence of kids playing in soils that are as high as you described, that’s kind of horrifying,” Gabriel Filippelli, an Indiana University biochemist who studies lead exposure, told Verite News.
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.
Larry Barabino is the CEO of the New Orleans Recreation Development Commission, which oversees most of the city’s parks. He said the city doesn’t routinely test for lead in parks, and he confirmed that the last significant effort to do so was in 2011.
He called Verite’s results “definitely concerning” and pledged to work with city officials, local experts, and a city environmental consultant, Materials Management Group, to potentially remediate unsafe parks.
“It’s definitely concerning if it’s at the level that’s considered a true risk or threat, and we would get it to Capital Projects immediately to get MMG out there,” Barabino said, referring to the News Orleans Capital Projects Administration. “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.”
But New Orleans is in financial straits, with a budget deficit of about $220 million, and it’s unclear what resources new mayor Helena Moreno would be able to devote to restart lead remediation efforts. In response to the financial crisis, Moreno has already 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.
Andrea Young heard pledges similar to Barabino’s 15 years ago. Like Hess, Young had a child who frequented Markey and had high lead levels in her blood. Alongside other mothers, she helped push the city to take action. Young thought they had succeeded but said she now realizes that the city didn’t do enough.
“It makes me question the value” of the work the city did, Young said, “and the safety we felt in letting our kids play there again.”
Testing New Orleans Parks
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.
But New Orleans, like many other cities, has a long history of lead contamination in its soil, from 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.
The federal hazard level for lead in soil was 400 ppm until early 2024, when the Environmental Protection Agency lowered it to 200 ppm for most residential areas and 100 ppm in urban areas like New Orleans with multiple sources of lead exposure. Last fall, the Trump administration eliminated the lower 100-ppm limit, arguing it was confusing to have two thresholds. It didn’t argue that the 100-ppm level was safe.
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.
Mielke said the Trump administration’s change 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 after the EPA established its first screening levels more than 30 years ago.
He said the 100-ppm level should still be applied in urban areas, especially New Orleans.
Verite conducted soil tests on the 84 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.
The average soil sample collected by Verite contained lead levels of about 121 ppm. 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 places like Gentilly and New Orleans East, developed mostly after the 1950s, tended to have lower levels, 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 100-ppm urban soils threshold.
Verite spoke to more than a dozen parents at playgrounds throughout 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 Brignac playground. All of Verite’s samples at that 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 said she didn’t realize her neighborhood park could be a source of exposure for her son.
“ I’m just, like, 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.”
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 hot spot in a park is concerning.
“The kid playing in that part of the park is going to get the highest dose,” she said.
A Legacy of Lead
Before the 1970s, lead was ubiquitous. A 2022 study estimated that most of the U.S. population born before the 1980s was poisoned by dangerously high levels of lead in early childhood, resulting in an average loss of at least one IQ point.
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 in some New Orleans neighborhoods 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 are especially vulnerable, in part because they like to stick their hands in their mouths. A child eating a dropped Cheerio or putting their thumb in their mouth after playing on a seesaw can be enough to cause harm. Rabito recommended that parents avoid contaminated playgrounds.
The only way to know whether a child has lead poisoning is a medical test. By state law, Louisiana health care providers are required to ensure every child between 6 months and 6 years of age receives at least two blood tests, recommended at age 1 and age 2.
But the law does not include a way to enforce those testing requirements, so many health care providers don’t test, according to a 2017 report from the Louisiana Department of Health. In 2022, fewer than 1 in 10 children under 6 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. “ Parents really need to get their children tested.”
Limited Soil Testing, Patchy Fixes
In 2011, the last time there was outcry over lead pollution in parks, 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 called it “not the greatest challenge, honestly,” according to The Times-Picayune.
Then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu promised a comprehensive response.
“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. Parents brought their children back to the reopened playgrounds.
Despite city leaders’ assurances of a broad response, only 16 parks were tested in 2011 and the city’s piecemeal cleanup covered only patches of contaminated soil rather than entire parks, according to documents obtained through public records requests.
That stunned the vocal group of parents who had pushed for cleaning up the Markey playground. Young, one of the mothers, said the scope of the 2011 testing and remediation was much more limited than she thought.
“If the majority of the parks they tested were high, what would make them think all the others are fine?” she said.
Verite’s testing found high levels of lead at several playgrounds that were remediated in 2011, including Markey.
The results disturbed Mielke, the Tulane toxicologist.
In 2010, Mielke led an effort to reduce lead exposure at 10 private 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 6 inches of Mississippi River sediment from the Bonnet Carré Spillway, a source of clean, cheap, and easily accessible soil. Lead levels fell, with most playgrounds testing below 10 ppm.
In contrast, the city’s remediation was mostly limited to areas with lead levels above 400 ppm, leaving many hazardous areas exposed. Testing and remediation reports obtained by Verite typically showed MMG focused on two or three spots in each park, with the rest going untreated.
At Easton Park in Bayou St. John, for instance, the 2011 remediation covered four areas totaling 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 swing set.
One park, Evans in the Freret neighborhood, wasn’t remediated despite lead levels as high as 610 ppm in 2011. The reason wasn’t clear in progress reports submitted by MMG. In Verite’s 2025 tests, Evans recorded the highest level, with 5,998 ppm in one location.
MMG did not respond to requests for comment.
Landrieu did not respond to a request for comment. DeSalvo, who retired last summer as Google’s chief health officer, said “extremely limited resources” forced the city to weigh its response to lead contamination in parks 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.
A Road Map for Cleanup?
Filippelli, of Indiana University, 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 go the expensive route of full remediation, which involves digging up lead-tainted soil and trucking it to a hazardous waste landfill. It’s 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 just more than 1.3 acres across the 10 properties. Filippelli estimated that similar work could be done today for about $20,000 per acre — about a fifth of what was spent to remediate just over an acre at New Orleans parks.
Remediation should be coupled with efforts to reduce contamination from nearby sources, primarily old houses shedding lead-based paint, 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.
Cleaning up New Orleans parks is also likely to 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,” Claudia Copeland said 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.”
Methodology
Verite News reporters Tristan Baurick and Halle Parker were trained to use an X-ray fluorescence analyzer, or XRF, a 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 took 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 accuracy of the testing by comparing it with a smaller set of park soil samples collected by her team last summer.
While valid, the method did have limitations. The results can’t be used to determine the state of a whole park. But even one elevated soil sample can provide a starting point for city officials to conduct more comprehensive testing.
This article was produced in collaboration with Verite News. The 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 Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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