7 ms·

Chicago has the most lead pipes in the nation

105 points by Brajeshwar 1y ago

SilverElfin 1y 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.
- toomuchtodo 1y 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.
  - brianwawok 1y 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.
    - toomuchtodo 1y ago
      https://youtu.be/jFTzwGv1sUg https://youtu.be/jFTzwGv1sUg https://youtu.be/t3hTQDfZrfk https://youtu.be/t3hTQDfZrfk https://youtu.be/BKGizzPJIqE https://youtu.be/BKGizzPJIqE https://www.leadsafechicago.org/lead-service-line-replacement 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/Engineering/WMdesignStd/CDWM_WaterSection_Standard_Notes_Info.pdf https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/water/general...
      - bluGill 1y ago
        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)
        toomuchtodo 1y ago
        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.
        bluGill 1y ago
        https://www.teppfa.eu/media/industry-studies/meta-study-100-years-of-lifetime-of-plastic-pipes/ https://www.teppfa.eu/media/industry-studies/meta-study-100-... 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 1y ago
        But has the tradeoff of using lead solder at every joint
        frosted-flakes 1y ago
        Lead solder hasn't been used in the US since 1986, when it was banned by the Safe Drinking Water Act.
        Scoundreller 1y 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. https://www.workingpressuremag.com/epa-final-lead-free-ruling/ 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%20Management%20Treatment%20Changes%20FAQ.pdf https://villageofalsip.org/Chicago%20Department%20of%20Water...
    - stockresearcher 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
      The Chicagoland area is constantly rebuilding the roads regardless of what the pipes are doing... when it's warm enough anyways.
    - quickthrowman 1y ago
      They aren’t trenching through yards from the street to the house to replace water service lines, they’re digging a pit where the water main is and directional boring from the street to the house and installing a new service line in the borehole. ‘Horizontal directional drilling’ is the more technical term, directional boring is more of a trade name.
  - peterbecich 1y 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.
    - hippo22 1y 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 1y ago
      It's somewhat funny because most epoxy is just straight BPA. Yes, that BPA.
    - mikepurvis 1y 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 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.
- hedora 1y ago
  Crime’s down in Chicago. 2024 saw a ~6-7% drop: https://www.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024-CPD-Annual-Report-Final-For-Publishing.pdf#page104 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-reports/annual-reports/ https://www.chicagopolice.org/statistics-data/statistical-re...
  - blindriver 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - epistasis 1y 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 1y ago
        Chicago has nearly 4x the murder rate and 2x the violent crime rate compared to the US at large.
        kittoes 1y 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.
- qinsig 1y ago
  Pollutants don't get in because water pipes are pressurized
  - djtriptych 1y ago
    isn't this only true if they are always pressurized?
    - frosted-flakes 1y 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.
  - SkyPuncher 1y ago
    Absolutely not true. Pollutants don’t get into the lines because there are decades of mineral deposits built up inside these pipes.
- deleted 1y ago
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- deleted 1y ago
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- erosenbe0 1y 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.
- nkrisc 1y ago
  > 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.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
analog31 1y ago
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.
- spwa4 1y ago
  > My home was outside of the zone where lead pipes were present. That doesn't really matter, sadly, if it's connected to the same network. Lead has very bad effects on children in trace amounts, and in a network the water comes from everywhere (it takes all paths, not the shortest path, when you open the tap) Trace amounts inhibit brain development in children, and there is no treatment possible once it happens. Damage is permanent, even if you remove the lead (which is expensive and has serious side effects). In adults removing lead "works", if you don't mind the price and side effects. Normal concentrations of lead are toxic, as in they will cause your body to lose energy and die if the concentration goes up. Additionally, lead leads to kidney failure and cancer, years and even decades after exposure, in adults and children (though doubtless the Trump administration will shout "the cancer effects have only been proven in mammals". So you really need to hunt and replace the last lead pipe in the entire network. Because of how the water system works, that includes forcing landlords to remove old lead pipes inside houses. Oh and don't ask the forbidden question: "isn't the basis of our legal system that if an entity causes damage, intentional or not, it is financially responsible for the consequences. This includes government, and would seem to include both the medical damage done to people and replacing whatever is doing the damage"
  - robertlagrant 1y ago
    Is this definitely true? The water company we have came and tested and they said the lead level was too low to worry about.
    - iamtedd 1y ago
      Was it measurable and below a certain threshold, or was it undetectable, but they legally can't say there's zero lead content?
allenrb 1y ago
Does the Texas National Guard have many plumbers?
- vkou 1y ago
  Don't be silly, the purpose of the military is to fight the enemies of the head of state, not to help people.
  - cyanydeez 1y ago
    Dont be silly, the purpose of the national guard is to protect the rich white men from minorities and women.
    - platevoltage 1y ago
      Potāto / Potǎto
- sschueller 1y ago
  How much does that deployment cost and what would it cost to replace all the pipes? Removing lead can actually reduce violent crime...
wileydragonfly 1y ago
Run your tap a few seconds before you use any of the water, you’ll be fine.
- sct202 1y ago
  Needs to be a few minutes depending on where the lead is. I have lead service line and the city does testing and the sample collected after 3 minutes had the highest lead level by over 3x because that was the water that sat overnight in the lead service line.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    Sounds like whatever the location is is probably a non-issue if your first use of water for the day is toilet or shower.
throwmeaway222 1y ago
[flagged]
mlindner 1y 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 1y 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.
  - skeezyboy 1y ago
    ah the romans had em and they were fine cos the water never sat in the pipes for too long. just leave a tap running on drip and youll be safe
    - IAmBroom 1y ago
      Fine, aside from the elevated lead levels in their bones. Is your shift key broken?
      - skeezyboy 1y ago
        > Is your shift key broken? i dont think etiquette matters when youre in the comments section of some website mate
cma 1y ago
>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?
- themafia 1y 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 1y 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.
    - adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
      honestly just doing kitchen should be enough to get 90% of the benefit
gdubs 1y ago
Time to raise it up again: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
- ornornor 1y ago
  > 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!
  - aredox 1y ago
    Was that the inspiration for James Blish's Cities in Flight series? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight
  - skeezyboy 1y ago
    Im used to seeing wooden sheds on main st, but how were they able to lift a brick building off the ground, did they not have foundations built a few metres into the ground?
    - defrost 1y ago
      Using common old 19th century Victorian Britain tools; the jack screw, masonry chisel, greased boards, et al .. all that's required is to cut and separate the course above the foundations.
- api 1y ago
  Similar thing was done in Seattle.
xyst 1y 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.
- conception 1y ago
  Oh my friend, it wasn’t a mistake. It worked out great.
- nickff 1y 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.
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    Lack of regulations forcing the city to act and cutting federal spending on infrastructure to help them do it?
    - blasphemers 1y ago
      Chicago unions forced the installation of lead pipes for so long because of the higher labor cost of installation that the federal government had to step in and force them to stop installing lead pipes.
  - skeezyboy 1y ago
    richest country on the planet but looks like a charles dickens novel
    - nickff 1y ago
      You do realize that Dickens' famous tales took place in the richest country in the world at the time, right?
BrenBarn 1y ago
Who has the most Colonel Mustards and conservatories?
freen 1y ago
For those of you who like well researched analysis: the Lead Crime Hypothesis. https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...
keepamovin 1y ago
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? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6068756/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6068756/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10393136/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10393136/
- SapporoChris 1y ago
  Adequate ventilation will reduce the lead exposure. There are alternatives to using lead for bullets which would eliminate the exposure.
  - keepamovin 1y ago
    Nice. What are the bullet alternatives?
    - badlucklottery 1y ago
      Solid copper projectiles are the primary leadless solution on the market but they're much more expensive than the traditional copper jacket over lead core construction. There's also solutions like Federal Syntech (https://www.federalpremium.com/handgun/syntech/ https://www.federalpremium.com/handgun/syntech/) that doesn't get rid of the lead but fully encapsulates it to avoid the airborne lead problem.
      - keepamovin 1y ago
        It’s pretty interesting how the deformity and thermal properties of the metal would affect ballistics. I guess silicon is too brittle even though it’s cheap and plentiful and aluminum is probably too light. That poly is also interesting. the R&D they would’ve had to do to discover a polymer that would contain an exploding bullet as much as possible
        lazide 1y ago
poppafuze 1y ago
Pre-atomic-age lead is almost priceless to certain scientific endeavors.
platevoltage 1y ago
Not to minimize the situation, but Chicago is the 3rd biggest city in the USA. It probably has the most of a lot of things.
tptacek 1y ago
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.
- beezlewax 1y ago
  That is I assume the inside of said pipes gets covered in a rock hard layer of calcium and other minerals and there ceases to be any contact with lead in the pipes. He'll maybe plastic pipes are worse in that case.

105 points by Brajeshwar 1y 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.

toomuchtodo 1y 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.
- brianwawok 1y 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.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    https://youtu.be/jFTzwGv1sUg https://youtu.be/jFTzwGv1sUg https://youtu.be/t3hTQDfZrfk https://youtu.be/t3hTQDfZrfk https://youtu.be/BKGizzPJIqE https://youtu.be/BKGizzPJIqE https://www.leadsafechicago.org/lead-service-line-replacement 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/Engineering/WMdesignStd/CDWM_WaterSection_Standard_Notes_Info.pdf https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/water/general...
    - bluGill 1y ago
      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)
      - toomuchtodo 1y ago
        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.
        bluGill 1y ago
        https://www.teppfa.eu/media/industry-studies/meta-study-100-years-of-lifetime-of-plastic-pipes/ https://www.teppfa.eu/media/industry-studies/meta-study-100-... 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 1y ago
        But has the tradeoff of using lead solder at every joint
        frosted-flakes 1y ago
        Lead solder hasn't been used in the US since 1986, when it was banned by the Safe Drinking Water Act.
        Scoundreller 1y 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. https://www.workingpressuremag.com/epa-final-lead-free-ruling/ 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%20Management%20Treatment%20Changes%20FAQ.pdf https://villageofalsip.org/Chicago%20Department%20of%20Water...
  - stockresearcher 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    The Chicagoland area is constantly rebuilding the roads regardless of what the pipes are doing... when it's warm enough anyways.
  - quickthrowman 1y ago
    They aren’t trenching through yards from the street to the house to replace water service lines, they’re digging a pit where the water main is and directional boring from the street to the house and installing a new service line in the borehole. ‘Horizontal directional drilling’ is the more technical term, directional boring is more of a trade name.
- peterbecich 1y 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.
  - hippo22 1y 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 1y ago
    It's somewhat funny because most epoxy is just straight BPA. Yes, that BPA.
  - mikepurvis 1y 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 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.
hedora 1y ago
Crime’s down in Chicago. 2024 saw a ~6-7% drop: https://www.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024-CPD-Annual-Report-Final-For-Publishing.pdf#page104 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-reports/annual-reports/ https://www.chicagopolice.org/statistics-data/statistical-re...
- blindriver 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - epistasis 1y 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 1y ago
      Chicago has nearly 4x the murder rate and 2x the violent crime rate compared to the US at large.
      - kittoes 1y 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.
qinsig 1y ago
Pollutants don't get in because water pipes are pressurized
- djtriptych 1y ago
  isn't this only true if they are always pressurized?
  - frosted-flakes 1y 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.
- SkyPuncher 1y ago
  Absolutely not true. Pollutants don’t get into the lines because there are decades of mineral deposits built up inside these pipes.
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erosenbe0 1y 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.
nkrisc 1y ago
> 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.

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analog31 1y ago

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.

spwa4 1y ago
> My home was outside of the zone where lead pipes were present. That doesn't really matter, sadly, if it's connected to the same network. Lead has very bad effects on children in trace amounts, and in a network the water comes from everywhere (it takes all paths, not the shortest path, when you open the tap) Trace amounts inhibit brain development in children, and there is no treatment possible once it happens. Damage is permanent, even if you remove the lead (which is expensive and has serious side effects). In adults removing lead "works", if you don't mind the price and side effects. Normal concentrations of lead are toxic, as in they will cause your body to lose energy and die if the concentration goes up. Additionally, lead leads to kidney failure and cancer, years and even decades after exposure, in adults and children (though doubtless the Trump administration will shout "the cancer effects have only been proven in mammals". So you really need to hunt and replace the last lead pipe in the entire network. Because of how the water system works, that includes forcing landlords to remove old lead pipes inside houses. Oh and don't ask the forbidden question: "isn't the basis of our legal system that if an entity causes damage, intentional or not, it is financially responsible for the consequences. This includes government, and would seem to include both the medical damage done to people and replacing whatever is doing the damage"
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  Is this definitely true? The water company we have came and tested and they said the lead level was too low to worry about.
  - iamtedd 1y ago
    Was it measurable and below a certain threshold, or was it undetectable, but they legally can't say there's zero lead content?

allenrb 1y ago

Does the Texas National Guard have many plumbers?

vkou 1y ago
Don't be silly, the purpose of the military is to fight the enemies of the head of state, not to help people.
- cyanydeez 1y ago
  Dont be silly, the purpose of the national guard is to protect the rich white men from minorities and women.
  - platevoltage 1y ago
    Potāto / Potǎto
sschueller 1y ago
How much does that deployment cost and what would it cost to replace all the pipes? Removing lead can actually reduce violent crime...

wileydragonfly 1y ago

Run your tap a few seconds before you use any of the water, you’ll be fine.

sct202 1y ago
Needs to be a few minutes depending on where the lead is. I have lead service line and the city does testing and the sample collected after 3 minutes had the highest lead level by over 3x because that was the water that sat overnight in the lead service line.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  Sounds like whatever the location is is probably a non-issue if your first use of water for the day is toilet or shower.

throwmeaway222 1y ago

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mlindner 1y 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 1y 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.
- skeezyboy 1y ago
  ah the romans had em and they were fine cos the water never sat in the pipes for too long. just leave a tap running on drip and youll be safe
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    Fine, aside from the elevated lead levels in their bones. Is your shift key broken?
    - skeezyboy 1y ago
      > Is your shift key broken? i dont think etiquette matters when youre in the comments section of some website mate

cma 1y ago

>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?

themafia 1y 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 1y 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.
  - adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
    honestly just doing kitchen should be enough to get 90% of the benefit

gdubs 1y ago

Time to raise it up again: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

ornornor 1y ago
> 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!
- aredox 1y ago
  Was that the inspiration for James Blish's Cities in Flight series? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight
- skeezyboy 1y ago
  Im used to seeing wooden sheds on main st, but how were they able to lift a brick building off the ground, did they not have foundations built a few metres into the ground?
  - defrost 1y ago
    Using common old 19th century Victorian Britain tools; the jack screw, masonry chisel, greased boards, et al .. all that's required is to cut and separate the course above the foundations.
api 1y ago
Similar thing was done in Seattle.

xyst 1y 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.

conception 1y ago
Oh my friend, it wasn’t a mistake. It worked out great.
nickff 1y 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.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  Lack of regulations forcing the city to act and cutting federal spending on infrastructure to help them do it?
  - blasphemers 1y ago
    Chicago unions forced the installation of lead pipes for so long because of the higher labor cost of installation that the federal government had to step in and force them to stop installing lead pipes.
- skeezyboy 1y ago
  richest country on the planet but looks like a charles dickens novel
  - nickff 1y ago
    You do realize that Dickens' famous tales took place in the richest country in the world at the time, right?

BrenBarn 1y ago

Who has the most Colonel Mustards and conservatories?

freen 1y ago

For those of you who like well researched analysis: the Lead Crime Hypothesis. https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...

keepamovin 1y ago

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? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6068756/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6068756/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10393136/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10393136/

SapporoChris 1y ago
Adequate ventilation will reduce the lead exposure. There are alternatives to using lead for bullets which would eliminate the exposure.
- keepamovin 1y ago
  Nice. What are the bullet alternatives?
  - badlucklottery 1y ago
    Solid copper projectiles are the primary leadless solution on the market but they're much more expensive than the traditional copper jacket over lead core construction. There's also solutions like Federal Syntech (https://www.federalpremium.com/handgun/syntech/ https://www.federalpremium.com/handgun/syntech/) that doesn't get rid of the lead but fully encapsulates it to avoid the airborne lead problem.
    - keepamovin 1y ago
      It’s pretty interesting how the deformity and thermal properties of the metal would affect ballistics. I guess silicon is too brittle even though it’s cheap and plentiful and aluminum is probably too light. That poly is also interesting. the R&D they would’ve had to do to discover a polymer that would contain an exploding bullet as much as possible
      - lazide 1y ago

poppafuze 1y ago

Pre-atomic-age lead is almost priceless to certain scientific endeavors.

platevoltage 1y ago

Not to minimize the situation, but Chicago is the 3rd biggest city in the USA. It probably has the most of a lot of things.

tptacek 1y ago

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.

beezlewax 1y ago
That is I assume the inside of said pipes gets covered in a rock hard layer of calcium and other minerals and there ceases to be any contact with lead in the pipes. He'll maybe plastic pipes are worse in that case.