My town in Wisconsin had a big program to replace all of the lead service lines. As I understand it, the alternatives they considered included installing some sort of filter in each home, and they decided on total replacement of the pipes.
My home was outside of the zone where lead pipes were present.
allenrb 3 hours ago [-]
Does the Texas National Guard have many plumbers?
vkou 1 hours ago [-]
Don't be silly, the purpose of the military is to fight the enemies of the head of state, not to help people.
> Consequently, the practice of putting the old multi-story, intact and furnished wooden buildings—sometimes entire rows of them en bloc—on rollers and moving them to the outskirts of town or to the suburbs was so common as to be considered nothing more than routine traffic.
Incredible!
mlindner 2 hours ago [-]
Lead pipes are actually fine. They don't leach lead into the water unless you send something corrosive through them like what happened in Flint.
jMyles 2 hours ago [-]
"Fine" might be overstating things, but yes we need to move the conversation toward water ph, which is probably at least as important as heavy metal pipes. Municipal water supplies need to be from clean alkaline sources.
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.
BrenBarn 1 hours ago [-]
Who has the most Colonel Mustards and conservatories?
xyst 1 hours ago [-]
> … and that the city isn’t planning to finish replacing them until 2076, three decades past a federal deadline.
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.
nickff 2 minutes ago [-]
What does Reaganomics have to do with Chicago failing to replace its water pipes? It’s a deeply Democratic city in a very Democratic state, and all three levels of government have been consistently increasing their spending in almost every area.
conception 1 hours ago [-]
Oh my friend, it wasn’t a mistake. It worked out great.
4 hours ago [-]
freen 54 minutes ago [-]
For those of you who like well researched analysis: the Lead Crime Hypothesis.
>Chicago has the highest number of lead water service lines in the nation, with an estimated 412,000 of about 491,000 lines at least partly made of lead or contaminated with the dangerous metal.
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?
antif 2 hours ago [-]
Seems like continuous edge testing would be a critical first step.
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.
erosenbe0 51 minutes ago [-]
Primary source of exposure in Chicago is from household dust contaminated by old paint. Water is secondary or tertiary issue, but can be bad. The article is a bit off the mark as they did not interview the Chicago DPH inspectors who respond to high serum reports.
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.]
themafia 2 hours ago [-]
> Reverse osmosis systems for the main drinking water sources are around $200 each now
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.
antif 1 hours ago [-]
With RO, could* focus on kitchen and bathroom sinks; amortized cost should be $5-10 per-month per-sink.
Toilet, shower, and laundry could all be low-risk with unfiltered service tap water.
throwmeaway222 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
wileydragonfly 3 hours ago [-]
Run your tap a few seconds before you use any of the water, you’ll be fine.
SilverElfin 3 days ago [-]
I wonder what the accuracy of the data is like. And what do you do about damaged pipes? I read that cities lose a lot of water to leaks. Doesn’t that also mean pollutants can get in? And it won’t matter if your pipe is lead or whatever else.
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.
Crime is up like crazy. Crime reporting within departments is down
root_axis 2 hours ago [-]
Based on what?
freen 52 minutes ago [-]
Why would cops not report on crime?
Seems counter to the incentive structures of police departments.
blindriver 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tdb7893 2 hours ago [-]
Crime is down just based on the actual numbers (also anecdotally from someone who has spent the majority of their life in/around the city) and for most people the city is pretty safe right now. While there is violence this sort of pearl clutching historically hurts those exact communities you're talking about (and also is not how the people I've met from those communities described their experiences anyway).
blindriver 2 hours ago [-]
Crime is only down because you're comparing against the pandemic highs. If you look at the long term trends, it's still up and to the right compared to 10 years ago and previous to that. The fact you are okay with this disgusting level of violence in minority communities is really something else.
kittoes 1 hours ago [-]
This just isn't true... none of the available data backs up these claims. Go back 10, 20, even 30 years and the trend has only lowered. Crime peaked in the early nineties and even the COVID spike didn't come close to that peak. If you're going to make such outlandish claims, then you'd better have something other than feels backing you.
tdb7893 7 minutes ago [-]
"disgusting level of violence in minority communities" -> this is so clearly an insulting way to refer to these communities it boggles the mind that someone would say it while accusing someone else of not being concerned enough. These communities have people I like and care about so I do care about these communities, which is exactly why I am careful about what I say and don't compare them to warzones or tell them about what violence is like in their communities.
epistasis 2 hours ago [-]
That's a typical weekend in the US for a population the size of Chicago, nothing out of the ordinary for US fun culture.
The abhorrent level of crime is spread across the country, largely perpetuated by those who refuse to consider gun control. There were 16,576 gun deaths in the US in 2024, excluding suicides. 45 every day. About a third of those are children.
Chicago is close to 1% of the population of the US. Looking at three days, seeing a cluster of shootings, and not having the stats or basic business experience to understand the basic Possion distribution of events, is malpractice.
Whoever told you to be upset at Chicago, but not about the mass gun violence every day, tricked you. You got fooled.
silisili 2 hours ago [-]
Chicago has nearly 4x the murder rate and 2x the violent crime rate compared to the US at large.
kittoes 2 hours ago [-]
Yet it isn't even in the top 20 cities for murder, nor the top 50 for overall crime. The only reason so many are focusing specifically on Chicago is because their cult leader told them to.
blindriver 1 hours ago [-]
Chicago is the 3rd largest city in the US and has the highest total number of murders in the US. Why does this not matter to you?
kittoes 1 hours ago [-]
I made no such claim, merely pointed out the absurdity of focusing so much on Chicago while completely ignoring other places like Dayton. How come you're flat out ignoring the TWENTY other cities with a higher murder rate? It's completely disingenuous of you to focus on total murders when one surely understands that total population ultimately drives that value.
blindriver 1 hours ago [-]
> That's a typical weekend in the US for a population the size of Chicago, nothing out of the ordinary for US fun culture.
This is an outright lie. Why don't you care about the lives being lost in Chicago?
Chicago has double the rate of homicide relative to LA, double the amount of rapes and 50% more robberies.
Why are you okay with just letting Chicago live in such high levels of violence by trying to pooh pooh away the facts?
buckle8017 3 hours ago [-]
Crime statistics are virtually all based on arrest and police reports.
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.
epistasis 2 hours ago [-]
It's quite the claim to say that the police are hiding violent crime reports. It would be a massive indictment of local police departments.
What evidence do you have of this dereliction of duty?
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> It would be a massive indictment of local police departments
And be against their self interests. When crime is up, police get more money.
buckle8017 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ortusdux 42 minutes ago [-]
Are there any robust alternate crime tracking methods? Drug metabolites in sewage? Shotspotter data? Insurance claims? Replacement car windows per capita? GPS data? There must be enough alternative metrics to make it possible to compare crime and enforcement.
freen 50 minutes ago [-]
Arrest stats are also at historic lows.
Criminal complaints are at historic lows.
Murder, which is kinda hard to “juke the stats”, is at historic lows.
Where is your evidence?
toomuchtodo 2 days ago [-]
You replace them by running new service lines using directional boring, falling back to trenching when directional boring is not an option. In the case of waste and sewer lines, you can run an epoxy coating internally (“relining”) versus replacement, which has cost savings ($100-$250/foot of pipe).
Broadly speaking, maintaining this infrastructure is expensive because the need for labor is unavoidable and it is labor intensive.
peterbecich 4 hours ago [-]
I don't know that epoxy coating is used at the municipal level. Pipe bursting with high-density polyethylene is the typical solution to avoid re-trenching municipal sewer pipes. Epoxy liners, epoxy coatings and polyurethane coatings are typical for a single property.
I would argue pipe bursting is the best trench-less solution for any place, but it is more destructive than those other three options.
mikepurvis 3 hours ago [-]
I had my residential waste pipe lined with a fibreglass/resin sheath about a year ago. Inserting it was a process involving a lot of work on endoscopes and then the liner itself was adhered to the old pipe using a bladder filled with hot water. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cured-in-place_pipe
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.
hippo22 4 hours ago [-]
I know epoxy coating is used in large hydro power dams, so I have to assume it's used for municipal sewer lines as well.
Workaccount2 3 hours ago [-]
It's somewhat funny because most epoxy is just straight BPA. Yes, that BPA.
brianwawok 2 days ago [-]
Directional what? When Chicago replaces pipes, they dig the street up, put in pipes, and lay down a new street. I’ve literally seen them do this, then one month later tear up the same street for a natural gas pipe project .
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.
> 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.
Meanwhile everyone else has moved to plastic pipes which will last longer, are cheaper, and leach no metals (microplastics don't seem to come from water lines frome what I can tell, but I'm looking for confirmation)
coryrc 2 hours ago [-]
Contaminants can migrate from soil through plastic, which is a problem in the rust belt, but can be dealt with an aluminum barrier layer. What is harder to avoid is endocrine-disrupting plasticizers, because of regulatory capture.
Copper lasts ~20 years longer than plastic, making copper a superior choice for the longevity needed for the use case. Also, copper has anti microbial properties and rarely leaches in material quantities unless the water has a low pH.
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.
SlightlyLeftPad 3 hours ago [-]
But has the tradeoff of using lead solder at every joint
frosted-flakes 2 hours ago [-]
Lead solder hasn't been used in the US since 1986, when it was banned by the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Scoundreller 2 hours ago [-]
“Lead free” isn’t zero lead.
> 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.
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.
Copper is also susceptible to pinhole corrosion if iron gets into the pipes.
There are no similarly catastrophic failure scenarios for HDPE. HDPE also doesn't need plasticizers, so it should be safer than PVC.
stockresearcher 4 hours ago [-]
> in theory they claim to be working hard to better coordinate this between agencies.
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.
Spooky23 4 hours ago [-]
There’s lots of exceptions. The lead pipe hysteria and low pressure gas replacement is exempt from all of that.
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.
pengaru 4 hours ago [-]
The Chicagoland area is constantly rebuilding the roads regardless of what the pipes are doing... when it's warm enough anyways.
2 hours ago [-]
erosenbe0 23 minutes ago [-]
Median, normal lead exposure for toddlers in the 1960s and 1970s in any urban or suburban area would be 99th percentile by today's standards due to leaded gasoline vapors (and lack of awareness about paint dust).
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.
2 hours ago [-]
qinsig 3 hours ago [-]
Pollutants don't get in because water pipes are pressurized
SkyPuncher 3 hours ago [-]
Absolutely not true. Pollutants don’t get into the lines because there are decades of mineral deposits built up inside these pipes.
djtriptych 3 hours ago [-]
isn't this only true if they are always pressurized?
frosted-flakes 2 hours ago [-]
They are always pressurised during normal use. When they are depressurised because of a water main break or for maintenance (and they try to do this as little as possible), orders are given to flush the lines before drinking any of the water.
Rendered at 06:08:22 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
My home was outside of the zone where lead pipes were present.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
Incredible!
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.
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.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...
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?
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.]
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.
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.
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...
Seems counter to the incentive structures of police departments.
The abhorrent level of crime is spread across the country, largely perpetuated by those who refuse to consider gun control. There were 16,576 gun deaths in the US in 2024, excluding suicides. 45 every day. About a third of those are children.
Chicago is close to 1% of the population of the US. Looking at three days, seeing a cluster of shootings, and not having the stats or basic business experience to understand the basic Possion distribution of events, is malpractice.
Whoever told you to be upset at Chicago, but not about the mass gun violence every day, tricked you. You got fooled.
This is an outright lie. Why don't you care about the lives being lost in Chicago?
Chicago has double the rate of homicide relative to LA, double the amount of rapes and 50% more robberies.
Why are you okay with just letting Chicago live in such high levels of violence by trying to pooh pooh away the facts?
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?
Broadly speaking, maintaining this infrastructure is expensive because the need for labor is unavoidable and it is labor intensive.
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.
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...
https://www.pe100plus.com/PE-Pipes/Technical-guidance/model/...
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.
> 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...
There are no similarly catastrophic failure scenarios for HDPE. HDPE also doesn't need plasticizers, so it should be safer than PVC.
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.
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.