This story is a partnership between WBEZ, Grist and Inside Climate News.
Growing up in Chicago, Chakena D. Perry knew not to trust the water coming out of her tap.
“It was just one of these unspoken truths within households like mine — low-income, Black households — that there was some sort of distrust with the water,” said Perry, who later learned that Chicago is the city with the most lead service lines in the country. “No one really talked about it, but we never used our tap for just regular drinking.”
Now a senior policy advocate for the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council,Perry is part of a coalition that fought for stricter rules to force cities like Chicago to remove their toxic lead pipes faster. Last year, advocates celebrated a big win: The Biden-era U.S. Environmental Protection Agency mandated that all water systems across the country begin replacing their lead service lines by 2027. Under the new rule, Chicago would have about 20 years to replace its estimated 412,000 lead service lines, giving the city its most accelerated timeline yet for dealing with the public health crisis. Lead is especially harmful to children with developing brains and can cause a number of serious health conditions in adults.
But Chicago is set to fall 30 years behind that timeline, according to the city’s replacement plan, submitted to the Illinois EPA in April and obtained through a public records request. It aims to complete 8,300 replacements annually for 50 years, wrapping up in 2076.
The federal rule requires Chicago to replace nearly 20,000 pipes a year beginning in 2027 — more than double the speed of the city’s current plan, which is sticking to a less stringent state law. Documents show city officials are aware of the new requirements but have not yet updated their plans.
When lead pipes corrode, the toxic material can dissolve or flake into water and poison residents without their knowledge.
A delayed timeline would expose many more children and adults to the risk of toxic drinking water. A study published last year found two-thirds of Chicago children under 6 years old live in homes with tap water containing detectable levels of lead.
Rising temperatures from climate change may also exacerbate the risk by causing more lead to leach off pipes and into water. Researchers have found that childhood lead poisoning levels spike during hotter periods.
For Perry, even 20 more years of lead pipes was a compromise.
“People are already being exposed — they’re being exposed daily,” she said. “There is no number [of years] that is satisfactory to me, but 20-ish years is better than 50.”
In recent decades, drinking water crises in Washington, D.C., and Flint, Mich., put the public health threat of lead on the national map. About 9 million lead service lines need to be replaced nationwide to adhere to the new requirements, including about 1 million in Illinois — the most of any state in the country.
Among the five U.S. cities estimated to have the most lead pipes — Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Detroit and Milwaukee — only Chicago has yet to adopt the latest federal deadline. The rest plan to replace their lead pipes within a decade of 2027.
Experts emphasize there is no safe level of lead exposure. The federal EPA estimates that its new rule will annually prevent up to 900,000 cases of low birth weight and 1,500 cases of premature death from heart disease.
In Illinois, the Metropolitan Planning Council found that people of color are up to twice as likely as white people to live in a community burdened by lead service lines.
Full lead service line replacement includes the replacement of lead-containing plumbing fixtures connecting different parts of the service line. When lead plumbing corrodes, the dangerous neurotoxin can flake or dissolve into drinking water, causing serious health issues including brain damage.
Vanessa Bly|NRDC
Chicago is facing a Herculean task, given it’s only replaced a total of 7,923 lead service lines the past four years — an average of about 2,000 per year, most of which occurred alongside other repairs and service jobs.
Megan Vidis, a spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Water Management, said the city expects to hit 8,000 replacements this year.
“We have been and will continue to move as quickly as resources allow to replace lead service lines,” Vidis wrote in an email. ““We need substantial additional funding.”
Erik D. Olson, a senior strategic director for environmental health and Perry’s colleague at the Natural Resource Defense Council, said these financial woes are a reason for Chicago to put forward a more ambitious replacement plan.
Olson pointed out that $15 billion in national lead service line replacement funds from a bipartisan infrastructure law expire next year.
“If Chicago isn’t beating down the doors to get that money, that is tragic, because that money could evaporate,” he said. “They should be front-end loading as much of the service line replacement as they possibly can.”
Perry now lives in south suburban Oak Forest, but she also owns her mother’s home on Chicago’s South Side. That home has a lead service line, and she doesn’t know when it’ll be replaced.
The city has “a responsibility to the residents in the city of Chicago to protect them at all costs,” Perry said. “There’s no price that’s too high to pay for safe drinking water.”
Navigating evolving state and federal requirements
The EPA enacted the current rule near the end of President Joe Biden’s term. Most systems across the country must replace all their lead service lines before 2038, while others with large proportions of lead service lines, Chicago among them, get until mid-2049.
Chicago’s plan says it will comply with that federal rule “if the regulations go into effect.”
Nationally, the regulation is already in effect, said Earthjustice’s Marissa Lieberman-Klein, and the EPA does not need to release any additional documents to make that true.
But city officials might be thinking this requirement will eventually be wiped off the books, she said, given the continued rollbacks of many environmental and health regulations by President Donald Trump’s EPA.
“It’s possible Chicago is just looking at what this administration has been generally saying about rules promulgated by the previous administration, and it’s saying, ‘We’d like to wait and see what they say about this rule,’ ” Lieberman-Klein said.
Some congressional Republicans tried to revoke the lead pipe replacement rule legislatively earlier this year, but they missed the deadline to do so.
Last year, the American Water Works Association, a water industry organization, challenged the rule in court, alleging that its requirements are not feasible. Environmental groups stepped in to defend the rule, but it remains to be seen whether the EPA will do likewise. The agency declined to comment on the pending litigation.
Chicago’s water department cited the lawsuit as one of its reasons for submitting a plan that doesn’t account for the 20-year replacement timeline. But the rule isn’t on pause, Earthjustice’s Lieberman-Klein clarified.
“The litigation does not stay the rule or change its effective date,” she said. “It still went into effect at the end of October, and nothing about the compliance dates have changed.”
U.S. EPA spokesperson David Shark didn’t answer specific questions about Illinois’ obligations between now and when the compliance deadlines start in 2027, citing pending litigation on the rule.
Illinois EPA spokesperson Kim Biggs wrote in an email that, until 2027, the state is operating under the replacement requirements included in the old 2021 EPA rule and the state’s law until 2027.
Where will Chicago find the money to get the lead out?
Over the past few years, Chicago officials say each service line replacement has averaged about $35,000, although they plan to lower these costs by more frequently replacing the service lines for full blocks at a time. This is much higher than national estimates, which range from about $4,700 to $12,000 per line.
Regardless, it will be no easy feat for Chicago to piece together the funds to finish the job quickly, and big proposed cuts to federal funding would make a challenging task even harder.
The Trump administration’s proposal for the EPA next fiscal year would cut the agency’s budget by more than half. Part of that plan: slashing almost all the money for the low-interest loan program that states rely on to update water pipes.
Trump’s budget proposal says “the States should be responsible for funding their own water infrastructure projects.” Chicago’s plan notes that $2 million of expected funding for a program focused on replacing lead service lines in daycares serving low-income communities was lost this year in the blanket elimination of congressional earmarks.