Chicago has more lead pipes than any other city in the country (Photo Credit: Canva Pro).
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This article was originally published on Word In Black.
Earlier this month, there was a deadline for water utilities across the country to submit a survey of lead pipes in their systems to the Environmental Protection Agency — the first step in the Biden Administration’s ambitious plan to replace all the remaining lead service lines in the country over the course of a decade.
But the accounting of the water-delivery system in Chicago, and the agency’s response to it, shows that the goal will not be met: the EPA is giving Chicago, which has more lead pipes than any other city in the country, until 2047 to finish replacing them all.
“That’s decades. That’s generations of children and adults consuming lead contaminated water,” Chakena Perry, a Chicagoland-based senior policy advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council told NPR earlier this year about the EPA’s generous timeline. “It’s incomprehensible to tell a resident that they need to wait that long for safe drinking water.”
Lead’s Devastating Impact
Lead is a powerful neurotoxin, and there is no safe amount to consume in water. The effects of lead exposure — which can cause developmental and behavioral problems, as well as fertility issues, amongst other issues — tend to be worse for people who are already experiencing other social disadvantages, such as poverty. Combined with the fact that lead water infrastructure is often found in cities like Chicago, lead exposure is an environmental justice issue that disproportionately affects Black and Brown communities.
Chicago has an estimated 400,000 lead service lines — the most in the U.S., which connect larger cast-iron or ductile steel distribution lines with the privately owned plumbing system inside a home or apartment building.
All that lead-contaminated water is by no means evenly distributed.
One recent study conducted in Chicago found that an astonishingly high percentage of children under the age of 6 (the age group at the greatest risk of long-term complications from lead poisoning) are exposed to lead in drinking water, nearly 70%.
“The extent of lead contamination of tap water in Chicago is disheartening — it’s not something we should be seeing in 2024,” the study’s lead author Benjamin Huynh, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said in a statement in March.
While Chicago has a significant Black and Brown population on the whole, all that lead-contaminated water is by no means evenly distributed. A significant concentration of lead service lines are located on the primarily Black South Side.
The fix — removing lead from water systems — is obvious, but it tends to never be all that quick or straightforward. And there are other cities with a large amount of lead too, including New York (100,000 lead service lines) and Cleveland (235,000 lead service lines).
The EPA has had a shifting formula for setting the deadline for cities with the most work to do when it comes to removing lead from the water system.
The EPA’s initial formula for granting extended deadlines to cities with the most work to do would have put New York at 14 years, Cleveland at 27, and given Chicago fully 42 years to do all of the work, according to an analysis by Policy Innovation. Thanks to a recent revision to the formula, however, New York is now on the 10-year timeline, and Cleveland and Chicago saw their deferred timelines cut roughly in half.
Flint’s Long Journey
The long-running effort to replace every lead and stainless steel service line in Flint, Michigan, shows just how arduous this kind of undertaking can be. The city has completed around 30,000 service line replacements in seven years at a cost of $100 million, and while the work initially moved at a rapid clip, it has ground nearly to a halt in recent years. With the finish line approaching, difficulties around finding remaining lines, and also with getting the necessary permissions to check publicly-owned service lines that run under privately owned front yards, have emerged.
There are bound to be similar hang ups in Chicago too, with access complicated by the fact that it’s predominantly a city of renters, not homeowners. Currently, a tenant is not allowed to permit access for service line work, only the owner of a building is. With a significant immigrant population now living on the South Side, there is also the concern that some residents will avoid anyone knocking on a door about lead-pipe removal in order to avoid the risk of deportation.
Then there’s the question of costs: while Flint is on the hook to pay for new service lines thanks to a court ruling that mandates the lead-pipe removal program, in many cases Chicagoans will be on the hook for the costs. Some low-income homeowners will be able to get lead lines swapped out for free, but those who don’t qualify will have to pay between $15,000 and $40,000.
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