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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It would be a drop in the bucket, if it's even a measurable contributing factor at all.
The primary cause is relatively boring: a century of racist housing policy, policing, under-investment, which results in a self-sustaining vicious cycle of poverty and crime. Couple that with broader national issues like the gutting of local manufacturing industry, the crack epidemic, the "war on drugs" and more and crime is what you get.
Chicago was (and still is) a segregated city, achieved indirectly through redlining and other thinly-veiled policies. Like many things, it's probably going to take much longer to fix the problem than it took to create it.
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.
>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?
Lead leads to above normal hostility and aggression. Lead paint, lead petrol, lead pipes - all must go. And maybe some kind of protection at shooting ranges?
Articles like these are frustrating because the mineralization of lead pipes (which prevents contact between water in the service line and the lead in the pipes) is actively managed by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, which is one of the most sophisticated water management agencies in (I think?) the world, and lead in pipes is not a major source of lead exposure in Chicago --- by far the biggest real culprit is paint.
If you want to map lead exposure, map home ages and renovations (and, unfortunately, the soil around the houses, which gets contaminated by the paint over time).
Ironically, for at least a short term after lead service lines are replaced, you're actually at higher risk of exposure --- the process disrupts the mineralization layer in the lines.
24 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 38.4 ms ] threadAn 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.
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.
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...
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.
It would be a drop in the bucket, if it's even a measurable contributing factor at all.
The primary cause is relatively boring: a century of racist housing policy, policing, under-investment, which results in a self-sustaining vicious cycle of poverty and crime. Couple that with broader national issues like the gutting of local manufacturing industry, the crack epidemic, the "war on drugs" and more and crime is what you get.
Chicago was (and still is) a segregated city, achieved indirectly through redlining and other thinly-veiled policies. Like many things, it's probably going to take much longer to fix the problem than it took to create it.
My home was outside of the zone where lead pipes were present.
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?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
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...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6068756/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10393136/
If you want to map lead exposure, map home ages and renovations (and, unfortunately, the soil around the houses, which gets contaminated by the paint over time).
Ironically, for at least a short term after lead service lines are replaced, you're actually at higher risk of exposure --- the process disrupts the mineralization layer in the lines.