City fails to warn Chicagoans about lead risks in tap water
More than two years after federal researchers found high levels of lead in homes where water mains had been replaced or new meters installed, city officials still do little to caution Chicagoans about potential health risks posed by work that Mayor Rahm Emanuel is speeding up across the city.
In a peer-reviewed study, researchers at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found alarming levels of the brain-damaging metal can flow out of household faucets for years after construction work disrupts service lines that connect buildings to the city's water system. Nearly 80 percent of the properties in Chicago are hooked up to service lines made of lead.
The study also found the city's testing protocols — based on federal rules — are likely to miss high concentrations of lead in drinking water.
Yet when city officials notify homeowners about new water mains being installed, the letters do not mention potential lead hazards. Residents are advised merely to flush all faucets and hose taps for several minutes after the work is completed to remove any "particulates," a solution EPA scientists and independent experts say is grossly inadequate.
While the crisis in Flint, Mich., is drawing worldwide attention to the disastrous consequences of failing to properly maintain a public water system, the Chicago study highlights a broader problem facing scores of U.S. cities that spent more than a century installing lead pipes to deliver drinking water.
Most older cities, including Chicago, add corrosion-fighting chemicals to the water supply that form a protective coating inside pipes. Officials in Flint stopped the treatment in an ill-advised attempt to cut costs. The EPA study and other research shows the anti-corrosion treatment also can be thwarted when street work, plumbing repairs or changes in water chemistry disrupts the coating, causing alarming levels of lead to leach from service lines.
"If you don't disturb the service line, it works pretty well," said Miguel Del Toral, an EPA water expert who led the Chicago study and played a key role in exposing what went wrong in Flint. "We need to do a better job telling people how to protect themselves when it doesn't."
Instead of cautioning Chicagoans they could be exposed to a potent neurotoxin in their drinking water, top city officials have repeatedly assured elected officials and residents there is nothing to worry about, even as Emanuel pushes to overhaul the city's century-old water system.
"I am taking this opportunity to set the record straight," Thomas Powers, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Water Management, wrote in a October 2013 letter to aldermen in response to Del Toral's EPA study. "Chicago water is absolutely safe to drink and meets or exceeds all standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Illinois EPA."
Annual "consumer confidence" reports sent to homeowners also don't mention potential lead hazards. In a note accompanying the reports, Emanuel says it is crucial to replace leaky water mains and improve conservation efforts "to continue our city's reputation for high quality, good-tasting water."
When questioned about water quality, officials say the city complies with the Lead and Copper Rule, a 1991 federal edict that created an elaborate set of procedures to test drinking water for those heavy metals. But the federal rule requires only 50 homes be tested every three years in Chicago, a city of 2.7 million people with more lead service lines than any other U.S. municipality.
Moreover, the rules require utilities to check only the first liter of water drawn in the morning. The EPA study found that although the first liter often is lead-free, high levels of the toxic metal can flow through taps for several minutes afterward, depending in part on the length of the service line between the home and street.
The water doesn't need to look or smell strange, either, as it did in Flint for more than a year.
The Flint crisis has made the hazards of lead pipes a national issue. But the Department of Water Management is doing even less to caution residents than it did a few months ago. Since October, the department has been sending homeowners a two-page handout before water mains are replaced that is missing any reference to lead.
An earlier version referred to "lead particulates" rather than just "particulates." But it was buried in a longer handout, after a plug for Emanuel's Building a New Chicago program and a list of historical events that occurred around the time the original water main was installed.
A department spokesman declined to make officials available for comment. In a statement Friday, the department said, "Chicago water is safe and pure, exceeding standards set by the U.S. EPA, Illinois EPA and the drinking water industry. It would be premature and inappropriate for the city to change its testing guidelines without official federal guidance and instruction."
City officials have repeatedly questioned Del Toral's 2013 study, saying the findings are "far from scientifically established."
Published in a respected scientific journal, the study was intended to influence a long-running debate about the Lead and Copper Rule.
After years of hearings, a group of EPA advisers issued a report in December that concluded the current rule masks widespread but little known threats to public health. In a separate report, a utility trade group said that if cities tested accurately up to 96 million Americans could be drinking lead-contaminated water.
The only way to guarantee the public is protected is to make it a national priority to remove lead service lines altogether, the EPA panel concluded. "Revisions to the (rule) alone are not sufficient to address this critical issue," the panel wrote in a letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy.
"The removal of all lead service lines will require significant financial resources and time," the letter to McCarthy said. "During this time it is essential to have in place a robust effort of consumer education and engagement to ensure protection from exposure to lead in drinking water."
Lead generally isn't found in municipal water systems until it flows into service lines from treatment plants and street mains. Long after other cities stopped connecting homes with lead service lines, Chicago kept requiring them under the city's plumbing code. Any home in the city built before 1986, the year lead pipes were banned nationwide, could have one.
The EPA says any household with a lead service line should flush pipes for three to five minutes any time water hasn't been used for several hours — not just one time after street work or plumbing repairs as the city advises in handouts to homeowners.
Two simple ways to do that are to take a shower or do a load of laundry. Before drawing water to drink or to prepare baby formula, faucets should be flushed for another 35 to 45 seconds to clear any remaining water sitting in the home's pipes, according to the EPA's recommendations.
For greater protection, EPA officials and other experts suggest purchasing water-filtering pitchers or installing devices on kitchen sinks that are certified to screen out lead. NSF International, a nonprofit standards organization, lists certified products on its website under the heading "Consumer Resources."
Today the only Chicagoans who get that kind of advice from city officials are the few dozen who collect samples of their tap water every three years to help the Department of Water Management comply with the federal testing mandate. More than half of the 103 properties tested since 2003 are owned by department employees or retirees, according to a Tribune review of property tax, deed and employment records.
Most are in neighborhoods on the far Northwest and Southwest Sides, including Norwood Park, Edison Park, Beverly and Mount Greenwood, which see few cases of lead poisoning.
When the department sends letters informing those select homeowners of their results, it includes thorough advice to reduce exposure to lead in drinking water, regardless of whether the tests found anything wrong.
Among the suggested options: "You may want to consider purchasing bottled water or a water filter."
Banning lead in paint and phasing it out of gasoline has led to a steady decline in childhood lead poisoning. But a 2015 Tribune investigation revealed it remains a pernicious problem in the same poor, predominantly African-American neighborhoods on the West and South sides that have given Chicago a national reputation for violence and academic failure.
Exposure to even small amounts of lead can permanently damage the developing brains of children, lowering IQ and increasing the risk of learning disabilities, aggression and criminal behavior later in life.
Children typically are poisoned by ingesting the dust of flaking lead paint that remains in thousands of older homes. But given the widespread use of lead pipes, many experts say it is urgent that cities focus on potential threats from drinking water.
"There is a price to be paid for scientific misconduct, and unfortunately it is borne by the poorest amongst us, not by its perpetrators," Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech researcher who has played a major role in the Flint investigation, testified last week before a congressional committee. "We have to get this problem fixed, and fast, so that these agencies can live up to their noble vision and once again be worthy of the public trust."
Chicago Tribune's Jennifer Smith Richards contributed.
- Environmental Science
- Scientific Research
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
- Rahm Emanuel
- Gina McCarthy
- Virginia Tech