A decade into the work, Chicago is finally taking out toxic lead pipes when it replaces water mains – Chicago Tribune

Chicago has spent the past decade ripping up streets to replace aging, sometimes leaking water mains, borrowing more than $400 million and doubling water bills to pay for the work.

On each of the 792 miles excavated, crews hired by the Department of Water Management connected new cast-iron water mains to old lead pipes known as utility lines, which bring water to single-family and two-family homes.

The department continued this routine even after a 2013 state study of Chicago homes found that people can be exposed to alarming levels of lead, a brain-damaging metal, without safe exposure levels.

Now, with less than 90 miles of water mains to replace, state law is for the first time forcing city workers and contractors to simultaneously pull out toxic pipes.

Contractors prepare to dig and locate lead pipe at the 3100 block of South Ridgeway Avenue on April 10, 2023 in Chicago. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)

For the past week, crews have been going from house to house in the 3100 block of South Ridgeway Avenue in Little Village to reconnect Chicagoans to the city’s water system with safer copper tubing.

The project marks the beginning of a more concerted effort to rid the nation’s third-largest city of some 400,000 lead pipes that Chicago had legislated by late 1986, decades after most other cities had banned the use of the toxic metal to carry drinking water.

“We’re excited that they’re finally starting to address this issue, even though it’s taken far too long,” said Kim Wasserman, executive director of the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization.

Four years ago, during her first campaign, Mayor Lori Lightfoot pledged to address a health threat her predecessors claimed didn’t exist. By the end of March, only 451 lines had been replaced in low-income households eligible for a share of federal grants.

[ Mayor Lori Lightfoot set a goal to replace 650 toxic lead pipes in Chicago in 2021. So far, 3 have been removed. ]

Another 306 were replaced during the response to leaking pipes and 110 were paid for by individual property owners, according to Water Department records.

For a number of reasons, the pace of replacement will accelerate not just in Chicago but across the state.

Gambino Perez watches from his porch as workers prepare to work on replacing lead pipes at Block 3100 of South Lawndale Avenue on April 10, 2023. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)

A 2021 law requires small water utilities in Illinois to replace all major service lines within 15 years. Larger systems are given up to 34 years to complete the work. Another legal regulation requires that house pipes must be replaced whenever new water pipes are installed.

Lightfoot lobbyists in Springfield blocked passage of the bill until state legislatures agreed to give Chicago up to 50 years to complete the work. At the behest of the mayor, lawmakers also exempted the city from water supplies until January.

Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson has pledged during his campaign to make replacing lead service lines a priority. In March, he noted on Twitter that most cases of lead poisoning in children in the city were occurring in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. “This will end with a Johnson administration – because water is life,” he wrote.

More money for work is on the way. Chicago will inevitably receive a cut of the $3 billion that Congress earmarked last year for lead service line replacements — fulfilling a campaign promise made by President Joe Biden. The city is also borrowing an additional $336 million through a low-interest federal loan program for water projects.

“Chicago’s own monitoring shows that the city has a major problem with lead in water,” said Erik Olson, a senior strategist at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, which for decades has called for a more aggressive response from federal, state, and local governments. “What you need is someone who really wants to fix it, stepping up to the table and asking, ‘What are the obstacles and how do we get rid of them?’ ”

Newark, New Jersey highlights what can happen when city leaders stop denying they have lead-water problems and go to work to eliminate them.

After being criticized for his initial response to tests that found high levels of lead in Newark schools and homes, Mayor Ras Baraka persuaded New Jersey lawmakers to clear the way for local ordinances requiring a property owner’s permit to replace a lead line – a key change that has helped take the lead in rental properties.

City officials declared a health emergency and agreed to pay for the replacement of about 23,000 lead service lines rather than having owners contribute or making them fill out papers to prove they can’t afford the work .

Baraka also negotiated deals with unions to train local people for a project that was expected to take a decade to complete but was all but completed in less than three years. Crews spread out across the city, at one point replacing up to 120 utility lines a day, said Kareem Adeem, director of Newark’s water and sanitation department.

A worker at the 3100 block of South Lawndale Avenue on April 10, 2023 holds a coiled copper pipe being pulled from the house underground and onto the street to connect to the water main during lead service on April 10, 2023 at the At Block 3100 of South Lawndale Avenue, a lead puller attached to a backhoe to pull out the old lead pipe and at the same time an attached coiled copper pipe to pull it out of the house to the street is exchanged. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)

“We showed how to do it because we had the political will to do it,” Adeem said in an interview. “Every city needs that: political will.”

In Chicago, Water Department spokeswoman Megan Vidis declined to make Commissioner Andrea Cheng available for comment. The department has hired and trained more staff to replace service lines and is seeking funding for a “multi-year, multi-billion dollar effort,” Vidis said in an email.

Ingestion of even low levels of lead can permanently damage children’s developing brains and contribute to heart disease, kidney failure and other health problems later in life. In 2018, researchers estimated that more than 400,000 deaths per year in the United States are linked to lead exposure.

Like many other cities, Chicago adds anti-corrosion chemicals to its water supply, which theoretically form a protective coating in lead pipes to prevent leaching.

However, the Water Department acknowledges that lead-contaminated water can still flow out of taps, especially when people haven’t showered, washed clothes, or washed dishes for several hours. Studies in Chicago and other cities have also found that high levels of the toxic metal can flow out of faucets for weeks or even months after lead pipes have been jostled by roadworks or plumbing repairs, including water line replacements.

A 2018 analysis by the Chicago Tribune found that lead in tap water is a hazard across Illinois.

More than 8 in 10 Illinois residents live in a community where the toxic metal has been detected in at least one home in the past six years, the newspaper found. Dozens of homes had hundreds and even thousands of parts per billion of lead in their tap water — just as extreme as what researchers found during the same period in Flint, Michigan, where mismanagement of the public water system turned a global spotlight on a scourge that persisted largely hidden for decades .

[ Brain-damaging lead found in tap water from most Illinois communities during the past 6 years, Tribune analysis finds ]

In the past year alone, lead was detected in the water of at least one household in more than 60% of Illinois water systems tested, state records show. Several results were well above 5 parts per billion, the Food and Drug Administration’s limit for bottled water.

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Lockport found a home with 1,610 ppb lead in tap water, records show. Rockford found 800 ppb of lead in a home. Evanston found 250 ppb lead in one of his samples.

Blackhawk Sewer & Water contractor Khaild Waarith installs a copper water pipe at a home on South Ridgeway Avenue in Chicago April 27, 2023 in a bid to rid the city of some 400,000 lead pipes. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune)

If what’s happening on Ridgeway Avenue is any clue, Chicago still faces a number of hurdles to removing lead from tap water.

On Thursday, a woman refused to let workers into her home, turning down Ald’s pleas. Michael Rodriguez, 22, to see for himself how the first service line on the block had been replaced without digging up her neighbor’s yard. One of the workers said several other property owners on the block were “tired of seeing guys in suits” knocking on their doors asking permission to install a copper water line.

Water Board contractors reduce the impact of replacing lead utility lines by using a drill that requires only excavating part of the road. The machine first removes the lead pipe and then unwinds a spool of copper pipe from a home’s basement before plumbers connect it to the water main.

As Carmen Gonzalez looked down from her porch at her soon-to-be-buried copper water pipe, she said she was relieved the work was nearly complete.

“I’ve been drinking the water in Chicago for many years,” said Gonzalez, who moved to the city in 1972. “But then my kids said the water might not be safe and I started drinking bottled water. Now I don’t need that anymore.”

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