Chicago has a lead pipe problem.
The city estimates that about 412,000 out of roughly 491,000 water service lines require replacement because they are known or suspected to contain lead. That’s the most of any city in the country.
Service lines are the underground pipes that connect the city’s water main to your home’s internal plumbing. When these and other plumbing materials contain lead, tiny pieces of the toxic metal can dissolve or flake off into the water coming out of your tap.
The city offers a lookup tool where residents can search their address to see what their service line is made of.
But that information has never before been publicly mapped in a way that shows how the problem with lead service lines is distributed across Chicago and how that intersects with poverty and race.
To that end, Grist, Inside Climate News, and WBEZ have analyzed previously unpublished city records to create an enhanced lookup tool t... Read more
