A silent killer: Areas of eastern Nebraska identified as radon hot spots

Kimberly Buchmeier was just 37 years old when doctors gave her shocking news.

The healthy mother of three who had never smoked nor been around smokers had lung cancer. She got the news after visiting a doctor for some back pain.

“I'll never forget, on Monday morning, it was 8:04 a.m., and [the doctor] called me,” Buchmeier recalled. “He said, ‘Hey, look, we're not even going to talk about your back right now. I just need you to get to the hospital. I've got a doctor waiting for you. There's a mass on your lung.’ And I was like, what?”

Buchmeier had the lower lobe of her right lung removed and underwent months of chemotherapy. After her recovery, she started to ask: why her?

“I just kept digging and digging and talking to my oncologist about it, and like, ‘Hey, could this have been the reason, I have high levels of radon? And he's like, ‘Yeah, could have been.’”

There are 53 Nebraska counties that have average radon levels above 4 pCi/L (picocuries per liter), which is above the level the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommends for mitigation. Researchers compare a single picocurie per liter of radon to smoking two and a half cigarettes a day.

According to the EPA, radon exposure is the second-leading cause of lung cancer, and the leading cause for non-smokers.

Buchmeier said her house tested at 34 pCi/L.

Katie Schultis, the epidemiology and environmental health lead for Three Rivers Health Department in Fremont, said she’s seen levels as high as 60 pCi/L in Nebraska.

“Even if you've never smoked before — if you live in a home where the radon levels are high, you still could develop lung cancer or a lung disease,” Schultis said. “That's something that we don't typically think of.”

Test every two years

Radon is found naturally in the ground. It forms from decaying uranium.

“Radon is something that we can't see, smell, hear, taste, touch, feel,” Schultis said. “We call it kind of the silent killer, which can sound a little intense, but it's something that you just don't know it's there unless you test for it.”

There are no federal or state requirements for radon testing. The only state law regarding radon stipulates structures built after 2019 must have a passive mitigation system installed, with some exceptions listed. A mitigation system routes radon out of a house to lower the levels.

Schultis said she recommends every building — including public and residential — get tested every two years for radon. She added that even if a neighbor’s house tests under the EPA’s recommended limit for mitigation, people should still test their home. Levels can vary from one house to the next.

Schultis said Three Rivers offers free kits to residents in its service area of Washington, Dodge and Saunders counties, with the understanding the residents pay for expedited shipping to the testing facility.

She added that in 2024, the health department gave out 300 tests to residents across the three counties.

Three Rivers is a part of a state collective of local health departments for radon contacts, but Douglas County, Nebraska’s most populous, is not included in it. According to Douglas County Health Department Health Director Lindsay Huse, the department’s air quality environmental health team is only made up of three people, so they have limited capacity to take on more programmatic work unless they receive significant funding.

She said in this case, the amount the state offered was “not sufficient to cover the operational needs of participation in this project.”

Huse added that when her department does get requests for radon testing in Douglas County, they refer people to the state DHHS for assistance.

Depending on the test result, mitigation may be needed to lower the radon levels. Anthony Maeser, president of Radon Defense Midwest and National Radon Defense, said mitigation typically includes pulling air from below a slab of concrete in the basement and routing it through pipes out the roof using a mechanical fan.

Radon Defense Midwest works in eastern Nebraska, all of Iowa and the northwest corner of Missouri – all areas considered radon “hot spots.”

A passive mitigation system has all the components installed but not activated by a fan. It’s there in case a house ever needs to be mitigated. In theory, Maeser said it should make the process to mitigate later on quicker and cheaper, but that isn’t always the case. Maeser said in Nebraska, a mitigator does not need to be licensed to put in a passive system for new residential construction.

“When you consider the percentage of homes in Nebraska and Iowa that are high, they rank among the highest in the country,” he added.

Maeser said a misconception he often hears is that radon is only a problem in the basement. The basement may be where the highest concentration of radon lives, but it’s not the only place. Similar to how heat rises, so does radon through the air in the home.

Maeser used to be one of the people who didn’t know about the poisonous gas, that is, until he built a home. He said a real estate transaction is often how people first learn about radon.

“The good news is it's relatively easy to fix your home,” Maeser said. “It's not like we're walking in and saying, ‘You have to do this major remodel of your home and do a big, complex system.’ We can mitigate the problem, get it to a safe level.”

He said everyone should test, and it’s relatively cheap and simple to do.

“Test your home,” he said. “There's nothing that could be bad from that. It's pretty easy to do. Whether you go to a home improvement store and buy a $10 kit or you hire a professional to do it, it's the right thing to do, and we can make our community safer.”

Knowing about radon

Maeser said there isn’t enough awareness around the dangers of it. While organizations like Maeser’s, health departments and the American Lung Association do campaigns about radon, Maeser said there is still more work to be done.

“I think that [awareness has] been decades in the works,” Maeser said. “It's definitely better today than it used to be, but it's still in its infancy.”

Maeser said he hears many stories of how radon has impacted people’s lives. One story that sticks with him is of a woman who was dying from radon-induced lung cancer. She wanted to make sure her husband understood what radon was.

“She appreciated that I would walk him through the education side of things, talk about the real risk without doing it in a way that's a scare tactic, because that's the worst in this industry,” Maeser said. “We want to help people. We want to make sure that they understand the problem, and then that they can fix the problem, and there's ways to take care of it financially.”

Buchmeier said one of her biggest successes with awareness was motivating the school district her children attended, Johnson-Brock Public Schools, about an hour south of Omaha, to test and mitigate.

Nebraska Public Media reached out to several other school districts across the state to see how often they test. Some like Omaha Public Schools and Lincoln Public Schools test on a regular basis. Others like Elkhorn Public Schools, Gretna Public Schools and Fremont Public Schools do not test. Bellevue Public Schools tested in the high school buildings in 2022, and Ralston Public Schools tested once in 2008. Pawnee City Public Schools said they haven’t tested, but would be because of the inquiry.

There is no state law or requirement that schools test for radon.

Buchmeier continues to advocate and educate people about testing for radon. She said she used to keep test kits to hand out and would help people find free or cheap test kits when she ran out.

Now, 14 years later, she’s looking forward to her checkup this month. She’s hoping that her remission is still intact.

“I learned a lot about myself, not to take no for an answer and keep on going and just really fight,” Buchmeier said. “I had to fight for my family too, because it can come back, cancer can come back.”

But just because her story ended positively, Buchmeier said she wants everyone to know that’s not always how it is — and to test their homes for radon.