PARIS — Construction resumed at the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris on Monday, weeks after authorities had shut the site down over worries about lead contamination linked to the fire in April.

The work restarted with stricter decontamination measures in place, but amid concerns that authorities still weren’t doing enough to contain the blaze’s toxic fallout.

Over 400 tons of lead roofing burned in the fire, releasing a cloud of lead particles into the air. City and national officials have been criticized for reacting slowly and failing to fully disclose the risk of contamination for people living or working in the area.

One environmental group has filed a lawsuit, accusing the authorities of minimizing the risks for cleanup workers, apartment dwellers and schools in the dense neighborhood around Notre-Dame. Some critics have accused the French authorities of rushing to meet the five-year deadline set by President Emmanuel Macron to rebuild the cathedral at the expense of safety measures.

Benoît Martin, a representative for CGT, a large labor union, said that the five-year timeline was “unreasonable.”

“For us what is at stake isn’t the speed of reconstruction but the protection of the population and workers,” Mr. Martin said, adding that although stricter safety measures were now in place at the cathedral, “the issue remains for all of the people who work or live around the construction site.”

The building structure is still vulnerable — the Culture Ministry announced that several stones had fallen from vaults in the nave after a recent heat wave — and officials have denied negligence over the lead, arguing that they were doing their best to respond to an architectural emergency.

“The goal of all construction work done at Notre-Dame is not to restore the cathedral, but to prevent it from collapsing,” the Culture Ministry said last week in a statement.

Workers have also started to clean up an area of more than 100,000 square feet around Notre-Dame, which is still closed to the public and surrounded by tall barriers.

On asphalt streets, workers are using highly pressurized water mixed with a special compound to remove lead particles. For denser surfaces like granite, workers are using a special gel that is coated and left to dry for several days before being removed along with any lead particles that had been embedded in the stone.

Construction at the cathedral itself did not resume at full steam on Monday, and the Culture Ministry said that the pace would slowly pick up over the coming weeks as the new decontamination measures were implemented.

Those include the use of foot baths, showers and disposable wear to protect workers from lead and to keep toxic particles from spreading outside, along with strict checks on entering and leaving the site.

Lead is a heavy metal that can accumulate in the body, with serious and permanent adverse health effects, including for the development of the brain and nervous system, according to the World Health Organization. Children and pregnant women are particularly at risk, and even low levels of exposure can be harmful.

Workers are still shoring up the cathedral’s structure and removing metal scaffoldings that were around the spire at the time of the fire and that were welded together by the flames. Actual restoration work is not expected to start until next year.

“It is only the urgency tied to this persistent risk of collapsing that justifies the rhythm of the construction work that was started on April 16,” the Culture Ministry said last week, referring to the day after the fire. The health of workers on the site was “an absolute priority, above all other considerations,” he added.

Work at the site was suspended on July 25 to transition from “temporary” decontamination measures that had been initiated in the aftermath of the fire to more “durable” ones, the ministry said.

But critics were unconvinced, arguing that authorities only started taking the risk seriously in the wake of French news investigations.

Recent reports by Le Monde and Mediapart said that the authorities chose an unusually high threshold for street-level lead concentrations, that they failed to warn nearby residents about abnormally high levels of lead inside and around the cathedral, and that multiple warnings by health and safety inspectors over improper decontamination measures went unheeded in the months that followed the fire.

Annie Thébaud-Mony, a public health expert and the president of an association that advocates for work-related health safety, said that the authorities still hadn’t addressed worries about wider contamination.

“From the standpoint of environmental pollution, nothing has been fixed,” Ms. Thébaud-Mony said, adding that the authorities needed to provide a regularly updated map of lead levels around Notre-Dame, and that they needed to open a lead screening center nearby.

Ms. Thébaud-Mony’s group, as well as labor unions, are also demanding that the construction site be completely enclosed. City authorities argue that would be infeasible and not as useful now that the risks of lead dissemination are much smaller and more localized — a worker leaving the site with dust on his shoes, for example — than they were during the fire.

Anne Souyris, the city’s deputy mayor in charge of health, acknowledged that critics had forced officials to be more transparent.

Ms. Souyris said the city was still in the process of cleaning up and decontaminating schools in the area around Notre-Dame. Tests conducted at schools within about 1,600 feet of the cathedral had not shown any abnormalities, but lead levels at some schools in a wider perimeter were above the normal limits. All will be renovated or cleaned in time for the start of the school year in September, Ms. Souyris said.

“Even when the average levels are below the limit, we are cleaning the small sections that are above the contamination threshold, so that there is no ambiguity,” she said.

Over 160 children living or attending summer activities in the area near the cathedral have been tested for lead poisoning since the fire, according to the regional health authority. Test results for most of the children were below a cautionary threshold set by French authorities, but 16 were above it, and two were above an even higher threshold that triggers a mandatory declaration to health authorities.

But the health authority said that one of those two children had been exposed to lead at home, making it unclear whether fallout from the fire was responsible. Health officials had not yet disclosed results from investigations at the second child’s home.

Tests at shops and restaurants near Notre-Dame were normal, according to Patrice Le Jeune, the president of a local association of businesses near the cathedral, where tourists still throng, craning their necks to see the construction work.

But revenue has fallen, Mr. Le Jeune said, forcing some businesses to fire employees or put them on part-time schedules. Notre-Dame is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Paris, and Mr. Le Jeune said there were about 40 businesses and 300 employees in the area who depended on the foot traffic from tourists and pilgrims alike.

“Everything that has been happening since the fire has really been harmful for the shopkeepers,” he said. “It’s been like a roller coaster.”

Follow Aurelien Breeden on Twitter: @aurelienbrd.

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