As recently as 2018 Chicago officials denied the nation’s third largest city has a widespread problem with brain-damaging lead in drinking water, even though testing kits distributed by the city revealed high levels of the toxic metal in every neighborhood.
City officials pressed on, replacing hundreds of miles of water mains and installing scores of water meters, despite evidence the work made it more likely Chicagoans would ingest lead during the simple act of drinking a glass of tap water.
Times have finally changed. Not only did Mayor Brandon Johnson promise during his campaign to replace lead pipes known as service lines, his administration followed up by securing a $336 million federal loan to help pay for swapping thousands of them with safer copper pipes.
Combined with a required city match of roughly the same amount, to be financed with general obligation bonds, an estimated 30,000 of the city’s 400,000 lead service lines will be replaced during the next three years.
While that might seem like minimal progress, during the past three years fewer than 3,800 service lines have been pulled out of the ground in Chicago.
“Every child in this beautiful city, regardless of their ZIP code or their background, deserves lead-free water,” Johnson said Friday outside a home in the Calumet Heights neighborhood where local, state and federal officials celebrated the new loan.
Service lines are pipes connecting homes to the municipal water system. Chicago has more made of lead than any other American city, largely because clout-heavy unions ensured the city’s plumbing code required use of the toxic metal until Congress banned the practice in 1986.
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Most older cities, including Chicago, add corrosion-fighting chemicals to the water supply that form a protective coating inside pipes. The fix is hardly foolproof, though, a sobering reality that drew worldwide attention in 2015 when officials in Flint, Michigan, stopped the treatment in an ill-advised attempt to cut costs.
Two years before the Flint crisis, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study in Chicago found alarming levels of lead could leach from service lines disturbed by street work or plumbing repairs. Other research found the anti-corrosion treatment could be thwarted when only part of a lead service line was replaced with copper, a common practice in Chicago until state lawmakers banned it four years ago.
U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth noted that nearly a quarter of the nation’s lead service lines are in Illinois. She began pushing for a more aggressive federal response after Flint residents packed a committee room when she served in the House of Representatives, including a woman holding the same type of baby bottle the Illinois Democrat had used to feed one of her daughters.
“We can do this,” Duckworth said after pointing out Newark, New Jersey, replaced all of its lead service lines in three years.
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Duckworth, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin and Johnson hailed President Joe Biden, a fellow Democrat who pushed to include $45 billion for lead service line replacements in one of the big infrastructure bills Congress passed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The amount was whittled down to $15 billion during negotiations between Democratic and Republican lawmakers.
Some of that money beefed up the EPA loan program Chicago is tapping into for service line replacements. The local project is expected to create 2,700 jobs and won’t require an increase in water rates, said Radhika Fox, the EPA’s assistant administrator for water.
Tourance Smith welcomed the attention from Fox and others who looked on as a city crew installed copper pipe while pulling his home’s lead service line out of a trench dug between the street and sidewalk.
“I was nervous about trying to fiddle with it on my own,” said Smith, a contractor who has lived in the Calumet Heights home for a year. “But I knew lead was a problem and I’ve been filtering my water since moving in. Everything should be better now.”
[ A decade into the work, Chicago is finally taking out toxic lead pipes when it replaces water mains ]