Chicago Officials Aren't Doing Enough To Keep Lead Out Of Our Drinking Water
By Mae Rice in News on Feb 8, 2016 9:57PM
Unhealthy levels of lead in the water in Flint, Michigan prompted the city to declare a state of emergency in December—and Chicago officials are doing far from their utmost to prevent a similar crisis here, according to the Tribune.
Nearly 80 percent of Chicago properties get water from lead service lines, the Tribune reports, and when those lines get disrupted by construction, it can allow dangerous levels of lead to leach into the water.
So says a peer-reviewed paper from researchers at the U.S.’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), published in 2013, which also noted that city protocols for testing for lead, though based on federal rules, could easily miss dangerous concentrations of the metal in drinking water. It only requires Chicago to test the lead levels in 50 homes every three years, according to the Tribune—a far-from-rigorous system for a city of millions that has the most lead service lines of any American municipality.
Yet more than two years after this EPA paper was published, city officials don’t notify homeowners of the full risks associated with water main installation and construction, according to the Tribune. Instead, the city send letters to properties affected by such work that don’t mention lead at all, and simply advise people to run their faucets for a few minutes when work ends, to flush out unspecified “particulates.” (These letters once referenced “lead particulates,” but the word “lead” has been absent from them since October, the Tribune reports.)
Chicago’s Department of Water Management said in a statement Friday that Chicago's water exceeds federal quality standards
"Chicago water is safe and pure, exceeding standards set by the U.S. EPA, Illinois EPA and the drinking water industry," the statement says. "It would be premature and inappropriate for the city to change its testing guidelines without official federal guidance and instruction."
The situation eerily echoes the lead-up to Flint's crisis, not least because the children most likely to be harmed by lead poisoning in Chicago—as in Flint—are black. Children younger than 5 were, as of 2015, affected by lead poisoning at six times the Chicago average in the largely black neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and West Sides, as the Tribune reported in June.
Lead poisoning during the toddler years, has been linked with poor performance in school later in life, as well as with perpetrating violent crimes, the Tribune's June feature explained. Lead exposure can lead to less gray matter in parts of the brain governing various facets of self-discipline: focus, emotional control, and impulse control.