EAST CHICAGO, Ind. >> Stephanie King, a single mother of five, has adopted a grim routine over the past month: mopping with bleach twice a day and sweeping even more often to remove any dirt her family might have tracked inside. She has a haunted look, and for good reason.

King and other residents of the West Calumet Housing Complex here learned recently that much of the soil outside their homes contained staggering levels of lead, one of the worst possible threats to children’s health.

King’s 3-year-old son, Josiah, has a worrisome amount of lead in his blood, according to test results she received last week. Like about 1,100 other poor, largely black residents of West Calumet, including 670 children, she is scrambling to find a new home after Mayor Anthony Copeland of East Chicago announced last month that the residents had to move out and the complex would be demolished.

“If I’d have known the dirt had lead, he wouldn’t have been out there playing in it,” King, 35, said a few evenings ago as Josiah begged to follow his older brothers outside. “Oh, my God, I’m ready to go.”

The extent of the contamination came as a shock to residents of the complex, even though it is just north of a huge former lead smelting plant and on top of a smaller former smelting operation, in an area that was designated a Superfund site in 2009. Now, in a situation that many fearful residents are comparing to the water crisis in Flint, Mich., they are asking why neither the state nor the federal Environmental Protection Agency told them just how toxic their soil was much sooner, and a timeline is emerging that suggests a painfully slow government process of confronting the problem.

The mayor’s sudden decision to raze the complex, which is run by the East Chicago Housing Authority, and close an adjacent elementary school turns on its head a plan the EPA has had since 2012 to remove the contaminated soil without displacing residents.

People in this heavily industrialized city just south of Chicago are also asking why their governor, Mike Pence, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, visited flood victims in Baton Rouge, La., this month while campaigning with Donald Trump, but has not found time to come to East Chicago. Kara Brooks, a spokeswoman for Pence, wrote in an email that he had “directed his staff and Cabinet to provide support to the federal government” there, and that some of his staff and Cabinet members visited the area last week.

But the most pressing question for residents is why they were not informed until last month that even the top 6 inches of soil in their yards had up to 30 times more lead than the level considered safe for children to play in, and that it also had hazardous levels of arsenic. Farther down, the contamination is much worse.

So far, there have been no satisfactory answers. A spokeswoman for the Indiana Department of Environmental Management said the EPA was “the lead agency with the authority and responsibility for this site.”

Robert Kaplan, the EPA’s acting regional administrator for the Great Lakes region, said that for many years, cleanup efforts focused on the former USS Lead Refinery smelting plant and not nearby neighborhoods. In 2008, as the EPA sought Superfund status for the plant and the surrounding area, tests of several dozen yards at the housing complex found some “hot spots,” Kaplan said, but also soil with lead “under the level we’d be concerned about.” The EPA removed soil from the hot-spot areas, he said, and did so again in 2011 after another round of limited testing.

The EPA began suing the companies responsible for the contamination in 2009, and by 2012 it had a cleanup plan that involved removing all lead- and arsenic-contaminated soil from the housing complex.

Extensive testing to figure out which soil needed to be removed did not begin until November 2014, Kaplan said. And the EPA did not receive the final results showing “exactly where” the contamination was, he said, until this May. The delay, he said, was because of problems with the contractor the agency hired to tabulate the data and concerns about the quality of the data.

“Our first priority after that was making sure every resident knew not to dig, not to be in contact with the soil,” Kaplan said. Since early June, he said, the EPA has been covering bare soil around the complex with mulch; going door to door with fliers; and posting yard signs that warn, “Do not play in the dirt or around the mulch.” The EPA has also been testing for lead inside homes and offering to deep-clean them as a temporary measure.

Kaplan said the EPA had in fact warned West Calumet residents to avoid the soil for at least a decade, with public notices and community meetings. Kaplan said the hot spots discovered during preliminary testing had not created a sense of urgency partly because a 2011 federal assessment of the Superfund site concluded that “breathing the air, drinking tap water or playing in soil” in the area “is not expected to harm people’s health.”

When the EPA gave the lead and arsenic data to city officials on May 24, Copeland decided to seek to demolish the housing complex instead of moving ahead with the EPA’s soil removal plan.

“I cannot multiply this enough times, to tell you the irreparable damage that can happen to your child,” Copeland told residents of the complex at a meeting on Aug. 3. “I do not see how you can remove tons and tons of dirt and don’t aggravate the problem.”

Kaplan said the EPA still believed that removing the contaminated soil was safe. But, he added, “we respect the mayor saying he wants to go a different way.”

Copeland’s office referred questions to Carla Morgan, the city attorney, who reiterated that Copeland had sought to relocate West Calumet residents as soon as he learned the specific lead and arsenic levels in their soil.

Last week at the complex, which was built in 1972, some older residents said they resented being forced out, while many younger ones said they could not wait to move. Some, including King, were already packing.

The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has provided the East Chicago Housing Authority with $1.9 million to help residents pay for new rentals in the city or anywhere in the country, starting next month. But many questions remain, including whether the city, state or federal government will cover residents’ moving expenses and security deposits and whether they will be able to find safe, affordable housing with the amounts they receive. So far, only $100,000 has been allocated, by the state, for moving expenses.

“I have a voucher for Sept. 1,” said Akeeshea Daniels, 40, who is waiting for lead test results on her 12-year-old, who has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and her 18-year-old, who ends up in the emergency room every few months with severe stomachaches. “But they all want deposits, large amounts, which I don’t have lying around.”

Daniels is named in a housing discrimination complaint, filed Tuesday by the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law in Chicago, that says the East Chicago Housing Authority’s plan for relocating residents violates federal civil rights laws.

Jennifer O’Malley, a spokeswoman for the Indiana state Department of Health, said that since early July, 474 residents of the housing complex and surrounding neighborhoods had been screened for lead and that 29, including 19 children younger than 8, had elevated levels in their blood. But in a July 14 letter to the EPA, Copeland said preliminary tests had found that “hundreds of children suffer from excessive levels of lead in their blood,” according to The Times of Northwest Indiana.

Shantel Allen, 27, who has lived at the complex for five years, said tests had shown that all five of her children, who range in age from 2 to 10, had alarmingly high levels of lead. She said she had been told that her yard had some of the highest lead and arsenic levels.

“They show all the signs and symptoms of lead poisoning — they vomit randomly, have headaches,” said Allen, who said she had signed on with a lawyer. “Nobody’s given us any advice other than give them foods high in iron.”

Allen said that she would like to stay in East Chicago so her children can continue at their school, but that she would probably have to move.

“Nobody wants to answer our questions,” she said. “They just want to give us a voucher and send us away.”

Standing on her front steps, Allen pressed her body against her front door to keep her 2-year-old, Samira, from running outside. But children were playing throughout the complex, including Kaelynn Lott, 4, who picked up a ball from a patch of dirt as her mother, Nayesa Walker, begged her to stay on the sidewalk. None of Walker’s three children have elevated blood levels, she said, but she is weary of trying to corral them inside their small apartment.

“They’re just too young to understand why,” she said.

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