(MIRROR INDY) — Nearly a half-century after the federal government banned the use of lead in many consumer products and after the closure of lead refining smelters in neighborhoods around the city, Indianapolis still faces a lead contamination problem.

That’s concerning, because the toxic metal can damage the brain and kidneys and cause other health conditions in people exposed to it, especially kids. In 2023 alone, blood testing identified more than 70 kids in Marion County with blood lead levels high enough for health investigators to get involved.

At the Lead-Free Indy Summit on Sept. 19, the Marion County Health Department and IU Indianapolis announced a website called Lead Advisor. They hope the site will help make it easier for Indianapolis residents to learn where lead contamination has already been found and where to get the resources to ensure their homes are lead free.

The website “will eliminate barriers to healthy housing, something that everyone in our city deserves, as well as intervening on the problem before it even begins,” Mayor Joe Hogsett said at the summit. “It is a productive first step toward our vision of a lead free Indianapolis.”

According to the county health department, local lead contamination is mainly found in older homes that contain paint, plumbing or fixtures made with lead. Contamination can also come from smelters, like the Avanti Superfund Remedial Site in the Hawthorne neighborhood on the west side and the American Lead site in the Martindale Brightwood neighborhood on the near east side.

In many cases, people don’t know about the lead threat in their homes or neighborhoods until after they’ve been exposed. For Dr. Virginia Caine, director and chief medical officer of the Marion County Public Health Department, that is much too late.

“We can’t wait to tackle this problem after children have been poisoned,” she said at the summit. “We’ve got to reach them before this environmental hazard impacts them, and that means a lot of community education.”

How to use Lead Advisor

The Lead Advisor website lets residents type in the address of a home and check whether it has been inspected for lead. If it has been tested, the site displays inspection results and any violations found.

The site also will allow residents, school administrators and child care providers to schedule lead inspections and parents to schedule lead tests for their children. The website’s Lead Advisor chat function uses artificial intelligence to answer questions about the services offered by the county. The advisor can answer questions in multiple languages.

“I’m excited about the fact that you can look up and know in advance (a rental unit) has no lead contamination, or if I’m moving into a home, that it’s got no lead contamination,” Caine said.

The website is operational but is a work in progress. Right now, the site contains a few years of Marion County inspection data and does not contain the locations of smelters and other lead sources.

According to Karla Johnson, who is the county health department’s administrator, the website ultimately will be expanded to include more lead inspection data.

Finding all the lead sources may be difficult

Residents who live with or near lead contamination often have mixed feelings about testing, because they’re worried they may be left holding the bag for paying for cleanup.

Elizabeth Gore, a member of the Martindale Brightwood Environmental Justice Collaborative, said some residents did not want to be attached to the stigma of a polluted neighborhood.

Her neighborhood is located near the American Lead site, 2102 Hillside Ave., where a lead smelter operated between 1946 and 1965.

According to federal documents, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management knew about pollution there as early as 1980s and was in talks with the owner, Texas-based NL Industries, to clean up the site between 1996 and 2003. The negotiations failed, and the EPA ordered the company to clean up the site, which it did between 2005 and 2007. A decade later, lead from the American Lead plant was found in homes near the plant, and another cleanup was launched.

But despite the knowledge that lead contamination could be present, some people refused testing.

“People didn’t want you to come into their homes and grounds,” Gore remembered. “They didn’t want to be penalized for having lead.”

When home lead inspections are undertaken, homeowners can be held responsible for fixing the issues that inspectors find. That can create a tough situation for some residents, in a neighborhood where the median household income is about $24,200.

Patti Daviau has lived across the street from the Avanti Remedial Superfund site, 502 S. Harris Ave., for more than 50 years. She thinks the website is a good starting point, but believes the city is focusing too much on household sources of lead and not enough on finding where lead was used industrially.

“I just want to scream it from the rooftops,” Daviau said. “You can clean up all the lead paint inside the house, but if the main problem is the environment, then those kids are still exposed, those families are still exposed and new families will come and be exposed.”

More resources for lead contamination

To check whether your home has been tested for lead, head to the Lead Advisor website and enter your address. If it has been tested, results will appear at the bottom of the page.

Home lead inspections through the Marion County Public Health Department Lead Poisoning Prevention Program can be scheduled via the site’s Contact Us tab. They can also be scheduled by phone at 317-221-2155 or via email at leadct@marionhealth.org.

To test the soil around your home for lead, head to any of these 18 Indianapolis Public Library locations around the city to pick up a community science kit, which comes with instructions on how and where to collect the samples.

For more information, call the health department at 317-221-2000 or email healthdept@marionhealth.org.

Mirror Indy reporter Enrique Saenz covers west Indianapolis. Contact him at 317-983-4203 or enrique.saenz@mirrorindy.org. Follow him on X @heyEnriqueSaenz.