Department of Water Management Commissioner Andrea Cheng said federal funding will “jump-start” Chicago’s efforts to remove the lead service. Cheng acknowledged logistical challenges have meant the program has failed to achieve what Lightfoot promised in September 2020, when she vowed that the city would remove 650 pipes by the end of 2021.
Lead
In recent years, a patchwork of government and nonprofit programs have ramped up, offering help with lead testing and mitigation. But the need still far outstrips the available assistance, especially for high-priority places like child care facilities.
The $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill includes $15 billion to fund lead service replacement efforts, and $3 billion will flow to states and cities in 2022, officials announced.
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 commissioner of the Chicago Department of Water Management told members of the City Council that it was “quite impressive” that city crews had replaced 10 of the approximately 400,000 lead service lines responsible for contaminating Chicagoans’ tap water in 13 months.
As Chicago inches toward the replacement of its lead service lines, officials need help identifying where those pipes are. Here’s a simple way to determine whether you’ve got lead, steel or copper lines running into your home.
The $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure plan that advanced Tuesday in the Senate includes $15 billion to replace the lead service lines responsible for contaminating the tap water in approximately 10 million homes across the country.
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.
Included in the bipartisan infrastructure deal reached with President Joe Biden last week is a plan to eliminate the country’s remaining lead pipes and service lines, which for decades have posed a risk for contaminated water in millions of homes and schools.
The city has yet to replace a single lead service line in the eight months that have elapsed since Mayor Lori Lightfoot rolled out her plan, officials acknowledged.
President Joe Biden made sweeping proposals in his address to Congress on Wednesday. Among them, a pledge to tackle lead in drinking water. U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth has proposed $35 billion to update water infrastructure and improve drinking water quality across the country.
Chicago has more lead service pipes than any other U.S. city. Last year the city announced a plan to slowly replace those lines, an effort which has yet to get underway. Now, state lawmakers want to tackle the toxic problem—and they want Congress to foot the bill.
In the modest bungalows and two-flats of Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, there’s never a shortage of needed home repairs staring residents in the face. And then there is the less obvious but more ominous problem lurking in their pipes.
Illinois may have as much as a quarter of all lead service pipes in the country, according to U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who is leading the push for a bipartisan infrastructure bill to rebuild the nation’s water systems. We discuss what else is being done to address the issue.
The resignation was announced 3 1/2 years after Randy Conner took the top job amid a furor caused by the city watchdog’s determination that the Department of Water Management was rife with “overtly racist and sexist behavior and attitudes.”
Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Thursday unveiled a plan to replace the lead service lines responsible for contaminating the tap water in thousands of Chicago homes “over multiple decades” that relies on federal and state funds.
