Lead and Your Family
There is no known safe level of lead exposure for children. That sentence is scary, so it matters to be precise about what the risk actually is and what you can do about it.
How exposure actually happens
At a park, the main pathway is swallowing or breathing in lead-bearing soil and dust. Young children are most at risk because they play on the ground and put their hands in their mouths. Risk depends on how much lead is in the soil, where it is, whether grass or mulch covers it, and how much contact a child has. A high soil reading means the city should act; it does not by itself mean any particular child has been harmed. The fences exist to cut off the contact part of that equation, which is why they should be respected even when they’re frustrating.[12, 13]
Sensible precautions
- Keep kids away from bare soil near the affected areas, and stay out of fenced sections.[1, 12]
- Wash hands after outdoor play and before eating.[12]
- Take shoes off or clean them before coming inside. When cleaning up tracked-in dirt, wet-mop or wipe rather than dry-sweeping, which kicks dust into the air.[12, 13]
- Worried about past exposure? A simple blood lead test settles the question. Ask your pediatrician, or call Durham County’s Lead Education and Assessment Program (LEAP) at 919-560-4842. It’s free guidance from the county health department.[12, 13]
About the numbers you’ll see in the news
Different reports use different benchmarks, and mixing them up causes a lot of confusion. EPA’s October 2025 directive set a 200 ppm residential soil screening level and a 600 ppm removal management level for certain federal cleanup programs. Those are decision-support numbers for those programs. They are not a legal line between “safe” and “unsafe” for every patch of ground in Durham.[14]
The 2023 sampling rounds were compared against an older 400 mg/kg reference. So a 2023 result and a 2026 result may have been judged against different yardsticks. When we discuss concentrations on this site, we use park-specific validated lab data and say which benchmark applies.[11, 14]
Lead is also not the whole story. State investigations cover other metals, buried waste, groundwater, sediment, surface water, and landfill gas, with results that differ by park. The city reported no above-ground vapors in the rounds summarized in January 2026, which is good news about those rounds specifically.[4, 11]