70% of Chicago homes' water has lead, 30% have levels over bottled water limit - Sensationalist Headlines

www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/ct-chicago-water-lead-contamination-20180411-htmlstory.html Amid renewed national attention to the dangers of lead poisoning, hundreds of Chicagoans have taken the city up on its offer of free testing kits to determine if they are drinking tap water contaminated with the brain-damaging metal. A Tribune analysis of the results shows lead was found in water drawn from nearly 70 percent of the 2,797 homes tested during the past two years. Tap water in 3 of every 10 homes sampled had lead concentrations above 5 parts per billion, the maximum allowed in bottled water by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Alarming amounts of the toxic metal turned up in water samples collected throughout the city, the newspaper’s analysis found, largely because Chicago required the use of lead service lines between street mains and homes until Congress banned the practice in 1986. The testing kit results provide the most conclusive evidence yet of widespread hazards that have remained hidden for decades. Yet as Mayor Rahm Emanuel borrows hundreds of millions of dollars to overhaul the city’s public water system, Chicago is keeping lead service lines in the ground. Under the city’s plumbing code — the same ordinance that for nearly a century mandated the use of lead pipes to convey water to single-family homes and small apartment buildings — individual property owners are responsible for maintaining service lines. The mayor’s office has said it is up to homeowners, not the city, to decide if it is worth replacing the lead pipes at their own expense. As a result, critics say, the city is leaving scores of Chicagoans at risk and failing to seize an opportunity to fix more than one problem when crews dig up streets to replace aging water mains. “Chicago could be a leader on nationwide solutions to this problem, but instead they appear to be sticking their heads in the sand,” said Tom Neltner, chemicals policy director at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund and former assistant commissioner of the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. City and EPA officials advise that residents can protect themselves by flushing household plumbing for three to five minutes when water hasn’t been used for several hours. But in one of five Chicago homes tested since January 2016, the Tribune analysis found, samples contained high levels of lead after water had been running for three minutes. Even after water had been running for five minutes, 9 percent of the homes tested had lead levels above the FDA’s bottled water standard. One of the homes with the highest levels found so far is Jenny Abrahamian’s bungalow on the city’s Northwest Side. Abrahamian was so alarmed by the results — the first sample she collected contained 250 ppb of lead — she invested in a $1,100 system that filters every drop of water coming into her home, as well as an additional reverse-osmosis filter at her kitchen sink for drinking water. “I'm really happy I did,” she said. “But this definitely isn’t something that everyone could afford.” Chicagoans still pay less for drinking water than most other Americans, even after rates have doubled under Emanuel. But none of the money has been earmarked to replace lead service lines. The article also says they only test 50 homes every three years for lead, and most of the homes are owned by current or retired water department employees.

Probably because they are. How this man stays in office is really really baffling.

There are still loads of places in Michigan that also have dangerous lead and arsenic levels in their water, but the city and the government don't really care about it because "It'll Sort Itself".

I wonder how much impact this has on the city's crime rate? I understand there was a noticeable drop in the overall crime rate that could be linked back to the ban on leaded gasoline.

It would be pretty interesting if the reason Chicago has so much murder is because lead makes people unreasonably angry lol

Should remember there was a degree of self-selection involved in this process, so the true number could possibly be better or could be even worse. Whatever it is though, it's still decidedly problematic and I'd really rather not be drinking lead water.

It's almost definitely not the main reason. Chicago has a serious gang problem. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if lead in the water has been subtly exacerbating it for all of these years, though.

all of our water is contaminated with an assortment of crap. lead and arsenic are obviously top priority but the levels of pharmaceuticals getting into the water supply is also disturbing.

I just said this in another thread, but here in Pittsburgh, PA, as of last (I'm not sure about currently) our city's water actually had HIGHER lead content than Flint, Michigan. We're basically forced to drink bottled water only, or filtered water. I'm really concerned about what long term health effects come from even just showering with the water honestly, or if lead is building up in our clothing in the washing machine, not really sure if that happens. It's really fucked. There's no way the city is gonna replace every water pipe anytime soon, so I wonder what might be done in place of that to help our water, if anything. We might just all be forced to have advanced water filters installed in our home's main water pipes... which is ridiculous considering we're paying for this poison.

wow, that explains why the people there are such freaks...

This is light work compared to the fact that they shut down the Flint investigation and quietly tried to hush all the drama around the investigation - people in Flint still have to drink bottled water. America's infrastructure is slowly but surely crumbling, especially in the midwest & it's disgusting.

Wow that’s “they’re putting chemicals in the water which turn the frogs gay!” levels of bad.

Hey Trump If you want to make America great again and stir up that nationalistic vigor, can you please at least try to address public works crises

hey here's some tl;dr to lay the city's crime problem out the many low cost housing projects being built as the city upped its industrial sector in the middle of the 19th century were ideal: there was a promise of a place to live for cheap as you get your footing and start working all these new jobs. They were billed as mixed income and opened up their arms to everyone, with the expectation that living there meant they'd have access to jobs that'd raise their overall worth anyways. local government fucked up. A lot. Probably on purpose in a lot of cases. Funding slowed down, buildings fell into disrepair, less people wanted to live there, values of surrounding areas plummeted and only the desperate moved in or stayed in the problem zones. Crime rose alongside poverty, as it does. New businesses didn't want to open up near dangerous hotspots, exacerbating the poverty problem in those areas. these problems were left rotting and accelerating while the nixon era drug war and institutionalized racism (gasp) further turned 'poor black people who got trapped in shit situations' into 'that's just how it is in that area, they're druggies and got themselves into this mess'. Nobody wants to approach the problems for what they are because that snowball has been rolling downhill for half a century and it'll take decades to undo the cultural potholes, and the risk of political suicide is probably high as it'd acknowledge a LOT of hypocrisy and negatively call out those who enforced it

Sounds about right. However, regarding the lead involvement, I was under the impression that lead poisoning had been linked to decreased IQ, antisocial/criminal behavior and a few other behavioral/psychological issues that aren't immediately identifiable as poisoning.

learning disabilities in children, memory problems in adults. It's also just as coupled with symptoms along the lines of fatigue, depression, lack of appetite and motivation, so you could make just as many assumptions about rates of people not wanting to leave the house or being bad at remembering things. It's not a contributor like the actual lack of educational opportunity in the first place in crime-afflicted communities