Chicago Has the Most Lead Pipes in the Nation
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Chicago has the most lead pipes in the nation, with an estimated 412,000 lines, sparking concerns about public health and government accountability, and debate about the severity of the issue and potential solutions.
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An aside: lead exposure is thought to lead to increase violence. I wonder if Chicago having the most lead pipes is also a contributing cause of their (reputed) crime problem.
Broadly speaking, maintaining this infrastructure is expensive because the need for labor is unavoidable and it is labor intensive.
These Chicago pipes are end of life and need replaced. They have been working on it for at least 20 years.
*in theory they claim to be working hard to better coordinate this between agencies.
https://youtu.be/t3hTQDfZrfk
https://youtu.be/BKGizzPJIqE
https://www.leadsafechicago.org/lead-service-line-replacemen...
> Replacing a lead service line with a new copper service means running the new line from the water main in the street all the way into the house. There are two ways that can be done. With open trench replacements, a trench is dug from the home through the parkway to install the new service and access the water main. Trenchless construction runs the new service to the main underground, causing less disturbance to the surrounding area. The type of procedure performed will depend on several factors specific to each replacement.
https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/water/general...
> In 1986, Congress amended the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), prohibiting the use of lead in pipes, and solder and flux on products used in public water systems that provide water for human consumption. Lead-free was defined as solder and flux with no more than 0.2% lead and pipes with no more than 8%.
> In 2011, Congress passed the RLDWA, which revised the definition of lead free and took effect in 2013. Lead free was now defined as the lead content of the wetted surfaces of plumbing products as a weighted average of no greater than 0.25% for products that contact water intended for consumption, and 0.2% for solder and flux.
https://www.workingpressuremag.com/epa-final-lead-free-rulin...
A lot of municipal water systems have done more recent (but by no means required) improvements to the water itself to “coat” the lead in supply lines. Beyond just pH control, like orthophosphate. Most just in the last decade or so.
For Chicago, it’s an active project
> Polyphosphate is being removed because recent studies have shown that it may negatively impact lead corrosion control.
> Polyphosphate was initially added with the orthophosphate to mask discoloration of the water from metals such as iron or manganese.
https://villageofalsip.org/Chicago%20Department%20of%20Water...
This thread has had a lot of twists and turns, but I wasn't expecting this one. Yikes.
plastic is often rated at less but that is because they don't bother to test any longer, when properly installed and used plastic should last longer than copper.
There are no similarly catastrophic failure scenarios for HDPE. HDPE also doesn't need plasticizers, so it should be safer than PVC.
https://www.pe100plus.com/PE-Pipes/Technical-guidance/model/...
This is true. For the private sector, it works pretty well. Road digging permits are posted on their webpage 6+ months in advance. If you see one on a section of street you planned to do work on, you are allowed to piggyback on the project and share the cost. If you don’t, you pay the entire cost. So there is huge incentive to coordinate. But city agencies? Not quite so incentivized.
Some states are more schizophrenic than others. New York is simultaneously mandating replacement with high pressure gas mains that require biannual inspection and banning gas lines.
Lead pipes are an engineering and chemistry issue. Pipes that are functioning properly don’t need replacement.
‘Horizontal directional drilling’ is the more technical term, directional boring is more of a trade name.
I would argue pipe bursting is the best trench-less solution for any place, but it is more destructive than those other three options.
It was over CA$10k to get it done, but the cost of trenching that line could have been 3-4x the amount + an unacceptable risk to the foundation of the house from destabilizing the dirt around it.
https://www.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024-CPD-An...
There are pages of tables comparing 2023 and 2024 on page 108. Sadly, they don’t go back multiple years.
Page 112 says there were 9112 aggravated assaults in 2024.
Page 10 of the 2004 report says there were 18,731 that year.
I’m sure you can find someone that’s graphed the trends online. Maybe an LLM can do it. Anyway, there isn’t a violent crime crisis in Chicago.
Reports going back to the 1990’s: https://www.chicagopolice.org/statistics-data/statistical-re...
When crimes aren't prosecuted the police don't make arrests and the public don't make reports.
Crime stats are basically useless if the prosecutors aren't bringing charges, which is exactly what's happening all over the country.
What evidence do you have of this dereliction of duty?
And be against their self interests. When crime is up, police get more money.
Criminal complaints are at historic lows.
Murder, which is kinda hard to “juke the stats”, is at historic lows.
Where is your evidence?
Rather than believe and re-repeat lies from propaganda outlets (we have really good propaganda in the US and it uses social media to spread), check primary sources.
It takes less time than writing this comment did.
Seems counter to the incentive structures of police departments.
They also have stats on number of times people call or report crimes vs. number of arrests, gun pulls, etc.
Those stats overwhelmingly disprove the theory that trust in the police department has eroded and people are no longer reporting crime.
Additionally, while you think that the ordering of the report is in order of police’s priorities, I (more cynically) think it reflects them ‘burying’ the numbers.
It would be a drop in the bucket, if it's even a measurable contributing factor at all.
The primary cause is relatively boring: a century of racist housing policy, policing, under-investment, which results in a self-sustaining vicious cycle of poverty and crime. Couple that with broader national issues like the gutting of local manufacturing industry, the crack epidemic, the "war on drugs" and more and crime is what you get.
Chicago was (and still is) a segregated city, achieved indirectly through redlining and other thinly-veiled policies. Like many things, it's probably going to take much longer to fix the problem than it took to create it.
So the crime hypothesis is more about baseline level of criminality being higher throughout the entire leaded gasoline era and for a few decades thereafter. It's generally framed as social science based on aggregate trends rather than individual dose-dependent epidemiological hypothesis.
My home was outside of the zone where lead pipes were present.
That doesn't really matter, sadly, if it's connected to the same network. Lead has very bad effects on children in trace amounts, and in a network the water comes from everywhere (it takes all paths, not the shortest path, when you open the tap)
Trace amounts inhibit brain development in children, and there is no treatment possible once it happens. Damage is permanent, even if you remove the lead (which is expensive and has serious side effects). In adults removing lead "works", if you don't mind the price and side effects. Normal concentrations of lead are toxic, as in they will cause your body to lose energy and die if the concentration goes up. Additionally, lead leads to kidney failure and cancer, years and even decades after exposure, in adults and children (though doubtless the Trump administration will shout "the cancer effects have only been proven in mammals".
So you really need to hunt and replace the last lead pipe in the entire network. Because of how the water system works, that includes forcing landlords to remove old lead pipes inside houses.
Oh and don't ask the forbidden question: "isn't the basis of our legal system that if an entity causes damage, intentional or not, it is financially responsible for the consequences. This includes government, and would seem to include both the medical damage done to people and replacing whatever is doing the damage"
[0] https://www.dwi.gov.uk/lead-in-drinking-water
The stuff marked “hot water line” “lead safe” is all leaded.
Now, try to find equivalent lines (same threads, diameters, etc) that are not marked for hot water heater use. They don’t stock them, but they stock fixtures that require them.
One thing that puzzles me: ICE has been targeting Home Depot parking lots out here in California, but Home Depot is a big supporter of Trump.
I’d expect them to go after bluer Lowes lots. Maybe Home Depot has agreed not to sue for trespassing or something?
If so, that sounds like a breach of fiduciary duties to me.
It doesn’t particularly matter if small amounts of lead are used in hot water lines since you don’t (or shouldn’t) drink water from the hot water heater. Ideally your drinking water comes from a faucet that has separate hot/cold taps, if it doesn’t, then you should turn the faucet all the way to ‘cold’ when you’re filling a glass with water to drink.
Just less lead.
Alternatives are skipping the brass fittings/nipples and using copper, stainless, or the various plastics. I'm guessing you're seeing the stuff about water heaters because you shouldn't connect copper directly to water heaters (they have steel tanks which with copper creates a battery and corrodes the connection quickly).
And HD doesn't really stock stainless as far as I've seen, though you can certainly get it online. Not sure how it fits into plumbing code for potable water though.
re: the parking lots, in my experience HD is more popular with tradespeople. the goal of the raids isn't really immigration reform, but rather general fear - including for legal immigrants just trying to go about their business.
The smart money is on our finding, long-term, that PVC and PEX and all the rest of the final-mile water delivery materials are also dangerous in the presence of acidic water.
And yet, when you try to do a basic web search for alkaline water, overwhelmingly the results are crazy overpriced bottled water and/or con artists selling "water ionizer" or other such nonsense.
Is your shift key broken?
i dont think etiquette matters when youre in the comments section of some website mate
Sounds like a crisis, but it's the third largest city and much older than LA. Isn't a per-capita, above a certain city size, the more relevant number?
> A plumber estimated it would cost about $26,000 to replace the private side of the home’s service line. Swapping out his internal lead plumbing would cost thousands more. At this point, having just purchased the home, the couple doesn’t have the money to replace their service line. For now, they’ll keep testing and filtering their water.
Reverse osmosis systems for the main drinking water sources are around $200 each now, 100X less than the cost of fixing if it's just the kitchen sink that they drink out of. They do require maintenance that many won't do, but it seems like there could be an app for that or some kind of automatic timed shutoff with a reminder to buy at least one extra filter at a time.
Annual filter costs are 10X-15X less than interest earnings on $26,000. I think you can usually install easily with no plumber with a couple shark bite press fittings and a pipe cutter.
It sounds like that may be what they are already doing, but isn't it basically a good enough solution?
A whole house RO system is several thousand up to ten thousand dollars. A whole house heavy metal filter would be around $200. For this particular case they can likely do without full RO.
Toilet, shower, and laundry could all be low-risk with unfiltered service tap water.
But most water for drinking/cooking is going to come from the kitchen sink and refrigerator, which if it is too expensive to plumb into the one for the sink you can disconnect and use ice trays.
End users seeing water content in real time would absolutely motivate fixes.
Via ChatGPT, some groups of Chicago children are average 6-8 µg/dL blood lead levels, guaranteeing they’ll face challenges related cognitive disability. 100+ years of this—and all they need is good water filters.
This should be a class action to get fixed. No way the government can fix this alone in a reasonable time frame without focusing on end-users first.
Also, the average lead level of urban or suburban toddlers in the 1970s was 10-15 µg/dL, due mostly to vapors from leaded gasoline. Gen X had eye-popping lead exposures as kids.
So 6-8 µg/dL doesn't guarantee cognitive disability, but it is still bad.
[Edit: also want to add that quality monitoring doesn't necessarily fully solve the water situation either. For example, it is known that a chunk of leaded detritus or solder can drop into rice or pasta water from stream or aerator and raise serum precipitously, but won't be seen in a test as it is intermittent. The problem of lead is ubiquitous and not entirely tractable, but a lot of progress is possible over time.]
The very best units with high pressure achieve something like 1:2 ratios. Meaning for every 1 gallon of clean water you get 2 of waste.
Clean water is previous and should not be wasted so casually.
RO is OK if it's for something very small scale, like a sink for filling up water bottles - but it should never be used for things like showers/tubs, appliances, etc.
Municipalities might have to adjust their forecasting and step up the numbers on their next planned purchase of water equipment but that's about it.
While residential is small compared to commercial, it's still important. Multiply anything by a couple hundred million citizens and it does add up.
If someone’s in a location with more than enough water, there is really no point in trying to get them to care, because this really really doesn’t matter to them. Typically whatever they don’t use just runs off anyway.
They can use 5x the water if they want and only the water treatment plant employees will care. They take from the river, and they put back into the river after treatment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
Incredible!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight
Wow, that’s awful for the _third_ largest city in the USA. Federal, state, local governments have failed in providing basic services.
Thanks, trickle down economics! Reaganomics has been a massive mistake.
Chicago has been consistently Democratic for as long as I can remember. The state government has moved from republican to democratic but except for Rauner even the republicans in the past have patronized the unions.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6068756/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10393136/
There's also solutions like Federal Syntech (https://www.federalpremium.com/handgun/syntech/) that doesn't get rid of the lead but fully encapsulates it to avoid the airborne lead problem.
That poly is also interesting. the R&D they would’ve had to do to discover a polymer that would contain an exploding bullet as much as possible
Density sure does though.
Which is why 99% of the stuff you’re mentioning doesn’t really work.
Copper is quite dense, but still not as dense as lead, which is why it kinda works. Steel is terrible (but not completely useless). Tungsten works awesome (as does silver and gold), but is cost prohibitive except for specialized applications.
Interior ballistics: what happens inside the gun
Exterior ballistics: what happens when the projectile is in the air
Terminal ballistics: what happens when the projectile pokes a hole in the paper.
We use jacketed ammo (lead bullet coated in copper) because, with gas-operated guns, that lead dust that gets ground off of the bullet can foul up the mechanisms. Some ranges only let you use jacketed ammo because of the lead dust.
I've had copper pellets get stuck in airguns because they didn't swage to the barrel properly.
Edit: and suppressors for air guns are often called "lead dust collectors" because the drag-stabilizing skirt on a pellet is definitely going to leave some of itself behind. A bullet in a firearm makes a lot more contact with the barrel, so there's a lot more lead to lose.
None of what you are talking about is relevant in this context.
Jacketing is convenient for encapsulating lead, but you can run gas checked hard cast at generally the same velocities without any real issues. In that case the gas check is due to coppers higher melting/vaporization point. They are more expensive to make however, and finicky, which is why you don’t see it in production bullets.
The ‘copper’ pellet you mention was almost certainly not actually fully copper, but rather copper washed lead. But you can have lead harder than normal copper (heat treated hard cast is extremely hard and ductile), and copper softer than normal lead (annealed copper is extremely soft). Most copper people are used to working with is work hardened, but it’s trivial to make it ‘dead soft’.
That also has nothing to do with aluminum or other rounds you mentioned.
If anyone even uses them, which they don’t outside of very niche cases or experiments where it shows exactly what I am referring to.
density, however, is 99% of it. including for terminal, interior, and every other kind of ballistics. BC is king. And that is something that is impossible to fake, heat treat, work harden, etc. out of.
For example, initial engraving pressure can be changed or negated by minor changes in throat, regardless of anything else. Or a coating. Or any number of other things.
there is no replacement for dense mass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_bullet
Also, actual data:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2019/11/29/ar...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896971...
If you want to map lead exposure, map home ages and renovations (and, unfortunately, the soil around the houses, which gets contaminated by the paint over time).
Ironically, for at least a short term after lead service lines are replaced, you're actually at higher risk of exposure --- the process disrupts the mineralization layer in the lines.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...
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