Since my son was old enough to sit on his own, he loved to play in the dirt. When he was a toddler and we lived in New Mexico, we could sit him in our backyard that was full of rocks and dirt and he would move rocks around for hours, content to be caked in the high desert dust.
When he was 3, we moved to Iola and the first territory in our new home that became his was a corner of our property that quickly turned into his “dig pile.” What little grass grew there, was soon plowed over by shovels and sticks as his imagination blossomed with setting traps for foxes and guarding from invaders.
Watching him dig, I couldn’t help but notice he kept pulling up chunks of netting that I realized was originally from sod that had once been laid on our yard. I also noticed how many houses around our new town seemed to have new sod lawns decorating their properties.
Then I learned that is because the federal government paid for it. Not long ago, much of Iola’s soil was exposing our children to deadly toxins.
For decades, the legacy of smelting operations that once fueled the local economy left behind an invisible but dangerous reminder — lead, arsenic, and other heavy metals embedded in the ground beneath our feet.
Thankfully, these toxins that scattered across neighborhoods in Iola weren’t discovered because someone got sick or because there was a visible disaster. They were discovered because of a government program — the Superfund — designed to find and fix exactly these kinds of silent, long-term threats to public health.
The cleanup of Iola, which became known as the Former United Zinc and Associated Smelters Superfund Site, is arguably one of the most important public health interventions in our region’s history.
Since testing began in 2005, nearly 3,000 properties have been evaluated, and over 235,000 tons of soil have been removed. Imagine 18,800 school buses, or essentially every school bus from across the state of Kansas — and then some — all made of dirt, all gone. The toxic soil was removed and replaced, reducing the risk of developmental delays, behavioral issues, and lifelong health problems — especially for our children, who are most vulnerable to lead exposure.
It’s easy to take for granted. But none of that happened by accident.
It happened because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Kansas Department of Health and Energy had the resources and authority to prevent it.
It happened because public health agencies had the funding, the staff, and the political will to do what was necessary to protect our communities.
Unfortunately, the very employees and funding that supports lead poisoning prevention at the CDC has been eliminated thanks to the direction of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the “cost-cutting” Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE directed by Elon Musk. Under the Trump administration, the EPA is undergoing the “greatest day of deregulation” and unwinding practices established to make our country safer.
These cuts undermine the very infrastructure that makes Iola’s cleanup possible. Programs that provide lead testing for children, educational outreach to parents, and ongoing soil and water monitoring are under threat to be scaled back or eliminated entirely.
The implications for our community — and many others like ours across America — are profound. Without the funding and agencies to identify, test and treat the contaminated soil in our community, we could have easily become synonymous with Flint, Michigan.
Without continued funding, we remain at risk. We risk backsliding on the progress we’ve made. We risk letting another generation grow up in homes with unseen hazards and untreated exposure.
But, this isn’t just about Iola. From Flint, Michigan to East Palestine, Ohio, we’ve seen when public health protections and regulations are weakened, it’s working-class and rural communities that bear the brunt.
