This story was originally published by Capital B Gary.
By Jenae Barnes
Capital B Gary
May 13, 2025
For decades, Gary has worn the title “Steel City” with pride. Today, researchers are finding that a by-product of that legacy is airborne particles laced with heavy metal contaminants that drift into homes and settle in lungs.
Now, a new study offers a clearer look at what residents actually breathe and track into their homes. Over two years, researchers with the Northern Lake County Environmental Partnership collected nearly 400 road dust samples and paired them with data from low‑cost air monitors at over 300 locations across Gary and northern Lake County. Their findings are grim: Soil along Broadway and the west side contains lead at levels more than twice what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reference level for polluted areas, and iron concentrations that rival those found at known industrial cleanup sites.
The study’s preliminary findings, which are unpublished to date, also shows that airborne dust in Lake County is nearly three times more plentiful and smaller than in a comparable Indiana city, meaning particles can lodge deeper in lung tissue.
Even more alarming, the research links almost all of Lake County’s airborne manganese — a chemical element used in steelmaking — to emissions from U.S. Steel’s Gary Works. While manganese is essential to producing durable steel, long‑term exposure can harm the nervous system, causing memory problems, tremors, and other neurological issues.
Andrew Fulton, a U.S. Steel spokesperson, told Capital B Gary in a statement: “The EPA recently determined that emissions from integrated iron and steelmaking facilities, including Gary Works, are protective of human health and the environment with an ample margin of safety.”
Data on contaminants in Gary remains under-researched, with the first study on road dust testing being conducted only in 2019. A driver behind the study, researchers say, is that fenceline communities built near industrial sites, like Gary, often lack environmental testing. This creates an “inequity issue,” as communities disproportionately most in need of such studies, often cannot afford them. In northern Lake County and Gary, where legacy contamination has been prevalent for decades, the cost-effective road dust testing methods used by the partnership help low-income communities better understand what contaminants residents are living with — and the information needed to advocate for their health.
“My experience has been that northern Lake County is a community with not a ton of environmental justice representation,” said Esmee Belzer, a doctoral student at the University of Notre Dame involved in soil testing. “There is a unique opportunity to help the community in a way that they couldn’t necessarily help themselves, because acquiring environmental data is really expensive, and takes a lot of time and takes a lot of effort.”
In 2023, researchers, Gary residents, and members of the Northern Lake County Environmental Partnership, alongside professors and students from Valparaiso University, the University of Notre Dame, Purdue University, and Hope College, began testing for contaminants.
“Knowing that there’s people in your court who want to support this work, and in a time where that doesn’t feel federally supported … I really think it just comes down to having a diverse and large group of people coming together for a common goal and sharing their opinions on what we can do to improve it, that’s really all you can do,” Belzer continued.
While further analysis is needed to directly tie contamination hotspots to legacy polluters like Gary Works, researchers developed a map that correlates to the amount of contamination for particular areas in Gary and northern Lake County. Here’s what they found.
The study’s lead investigators, Ellen Wells, director of the occupational and environmental health sciences program at Purdue University, Julie Peller, professor of chemistry at Valparaiso University, and Graham Peaslee, professor emeritus in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Notre Dame, spent two years collecting 387 road-dust samples from 332 sites across northern Lake County. At Notre Dame’s Nuclear Science Laboratory, they used particle-induced X-ray emission spectroscopy — an advanced technique for detecting trace metals — to analyze each sample. The team then mapped the results to highlight contamination “hotspots” and link them to historic industrial sources.
Particulate matter are tiny particles in the air from different emissions like dirt, smoke, and soot, which is used to measure and monitor clean air standards and air pollution.
“Particulate matter can cause many adverse health effects, such as cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease and cancer,” said Jung Hyun Lee, a doctoral candidate at Purdue University, who collected and analyzed the air samples for the study.
To measure air pollution, researchers collected particles from northern Lake County to measure their size and describe their shape, and compare them to particles from a control site in West Lafayette.
Comparatively, there were nearly three times more particles in Lake County compared with West Lafayette, and the particles in Lake County were also much smaller in size, Lee said.
Additionally, Lake County’s air particles had dark, pointy crystal-like edges, which also indicate they were created by industrial activity, Lee said. In contrast, the particles from West Lafayette were larger, smoother, and circular.
Air quality was measured by using low-cost PurpleAir monitors, which record data every two minutes, compared with EPA monitors that record every three to six days.
The Northern Lake County Environmental Partnership is continuing to install and monitor PurpleAir monitors in the area. Residents can find real-time data on Gary’s air quality from installed Purple Air Monitors online.
Looking ahead, the partnership’s next steps are to apply their methodology to other PurpleAir monitors across northern Lake County, Lee said. Since these collect data every day, and are in more locations than the official monitors, they expect to determine any air quality concerns or data gaps.
A map developed by researchers shows preliminary findings of high amounts of lead and iron detected in the Gary samples, at higher limits than what is allowed by the EPA.
The EPA sets a limit of 100 parts per million of lead in residential areas, like Gary, while the limit for iron in soil is around 20,000 ppm. However, testing shows Gary is over the EPA limit of expected exposure for lead, with high lead concentrations along Broadway’s corridor and Gary’s west side, which can come from various sources, Belzer said, like older lead-based housing stock and industrial lead emissions. Testing also shows elevated levels of iron concentrations along the Lake Michigan coast, and in some residential areas of Gary.
Belzer added that while the findings suggest that there’s a large amount of lead contamination in the area, further analysis is underway to definitively source where it’s coming from and isolate other factors.
The study also suggests that Cleveland-Cliffs Steel Mill in East Chicago, about 20 minutes from Gary, is a significant contributor to Gary’s iron contamination.
Cleveland-Cliffs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The study compared levels to similar road dust studies in the 1980s, and found heavy metal concentrations in northern Lake County — including arsenic, cobalt, zinc and lead — were higher than national averages of similar road dust studies.
Finally, the study also found that U.S. Steel’s Gary Works is a large contributor of manganese contamination in the area, according to the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory database, which documents all releases of certain toxic chemicals that may pose a threat to human health and the environment.
In 2023, Gary Works accounted for 81% of all TRI reported air releases in northern Lake County in 2023.
Fulton, the U.S. Steel spokesperson, told Capital B Gary that a study relying solely on information in the EPA’s TRI database as indicative of “contamination” is “misleading if not fundamentally flawed.”
“The database not only includes permitted air and water discharges, but also materials disposed of in on-site secured landfills and off-site secured permitted disposal facilities,” Fulton said, adding, “This study clearly does not consider the full picture of environmental compliance at U.S. Steel or that the Gary Works facility has achieved a compliance rate exceeding 99%.”
In March, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the agency would review a range of air-pollution rules, including those for integrated iron and steel mills. In its latest SEC filing, U.S. Steel said it had applied for two-year exemptions from those hazardous-air-pollutant standards.
The data from these ongoing studies, will be uploaded to the NLCEP website.
Jenae Barnes is Capital B Gary’s health and environment reporter. You can reach Jenae at jenae.barnes@capitalbnews.org. More by Jenae Barnes
Capital B is a Black-led, nonprofit local and national news organizations reporting for Black communities across the country.
