Chicago’s Department of Water Management will receive about $22 million in federal funding to help replace lead pipes in the Austin neighborhood, U.S. Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin announced Wednesday.
The money will help pay to replace roughly 650 lead service line replacements as part of ongoing efforts to remove lead from Chicago’s drinking water infrastructure.
“Lead in our drinking water, at any level, is a threat to our public health, particularly to children,” Durbin said in a statement. “And the lead pipes in Chicago, the most in any city in the nation, have posed a health risk for far too long. With this major investment, we can continue the critical work of ensuring Chicagoans have access to clean water when they turn on the tap.”
More than 3,000 properties in Austin have tested above the current lead action limit of 15 parts per billion, according to Duckworth’s office. Duckworth said the $22,119,933 grant will ensure families and children have access to safer, cleaner drinking water and will protect communities from health risks associated with lead exposure.
The announcement comes just weeks after Duckworth and Durbin announced more than $316 million in federal funding for clean water projects across Illinois. The funding included about $295 million for the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency’s Drinking Water State Revolving Fund and about $21 million through the EPA’s Emerging Contaminants in Small or Disadvantaged Communities grant program to help communities address PFAS and other emerging contaminants in their water systems.
Illinois has the most lead pipes in the country. The state estimates it has 667,000 known lead service lines and another 820,000 suspected lines. Chicago alone accounts for nearly 30% of those pipes.
A study published in 2024 by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated 68% of Chicago children under age 6 lived in households in which the tap water contains detectable levels of lead.
For their analysis, the researchers used machine learning, an artificial intelligence technique, to gauge likely levels of lead in tap water in households across Chicago, based on an existing dataset that includes results from 38,385 tap water tests taken from 2016 to 2023. The tests were from households that had registered for a free self-administered testing service for lead exposure.
In a 2022 report, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency found a single service line replacement can cost anywhere from $4,000 to $13,000 across the state, with the cost even higher in Chicago. City officials estimated replacements cost more than $30,000 per line on average.
State officials have estimated that replacing all the known or suspected lead pipes across Illinois could cost between $6 billion and $10 billion.
It was not immediately clear when work would begin.