Decades after officials banned lead in gasoline for new cars and stopped the sale of lead paint there are still an estimated 500,000 U.S. children with levels of lead in their blood that are considered high, and experts say lead in drinking water is an important source.
Infrastructure
Over Thanksgiving week, hundreds of Robbins residents were left with dry homes following two water main breaks. It is just part of a long history of water infratructure problems in the town.
Representatives of the city’s Department of Transportation and the Budget Office declined to provide WTTW News with a full breakdown of spending during 2021 and 2022 under the banner of Chicago Works.
Pay raises for the federal firefighters had been included in last year’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill, but they had been held up as Biden administration officials studied recruitment and retention data to decide where to deliver them.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said America faces a crisis on its roads. The safety administration urged state and local governments, drivers and safety advocates to join in an effort to reverse the rising death trend.
The 10.5% jump over 2020 numbers was the largest percentage increase since the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began its fatality data collection system in 1975. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said America faces a crisis on its roads.
Lead service lines connect approximately 400,000 Chicago homes with water mains buried under city streets, and can leach a brain-damaging chemical into drinking water.
The $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill approved in November 2021 includes $15 billion to fund lead service line replacement efforts and $3 billion is set to flow to states and cities in 2022. A Biden administration plan calls for all of the lead service lines to be removed in a decade. That would cost $45 billion.
For much of the past couple of decades, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers declined to reveal the conditions of dams in the National Inventory of Dams — which it maintains — citing security concerns stemming from the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
A report from the Illinois Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers has graded the state on everything from roads to drinking water. The last time the report was released was 2018.
A certification and bidding process opened Tuesday for a civil nuclear credit program that is intended to bail out financially distressed owners or operators of nuclear power reactors, the U.S. Department of Energy told The Associated Press exclusively, shortly before the official announcement.
A rule finalized Tuesday will restore key provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act, a bedrock environmental law designed to ensure community safeguards during environmental reviews for a wide range of federal projects and decisions, the White House said.
The infusion from the bipartisan measure enacted in November, combined with annual funding through an ongoing recovery program, will enable agencies by 2030 to finish work on 22 sites designated a quarter-century ago as among the region's most degraded.
The $1 trillion infrastructure plan was signed into law by President Joe Biden. Nationwide, the plan will send billions to state and local governments for long-needed upgrades. 17 billion of those dollars are headed to Illinois, adding to the 45 billion the state is already spending on infrastructure thanks to the 2019 Rebuild Illinois bill.
The $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure plan signed into law Monday by President Joe Biden includes $1.7 billion that will help Chicago “kick-start” lagging efforts to replace lead service lines responsible for contaminating the tap water in homes across the city, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said.
The president hopes to use the infrastructure law to build back his popularity, which has taken a hit amid rising inflation and the inability to fully shake the public health and economic risks from COVID-19.
