Outrageous Levels Of Lead Discovered in Chicago’s Water, Report Says
Lead has been found in water samples from Chicago that are really high and way above the approved levels! They have been drinking this water for years if not decades in some areas? This is outrageous! The pipes need changing NOW!
Brain-damaging lead found in tap water in hundreds of homes tested across Chicago, results show. Because of all that is going on in Flint, Michigan, people in Chicago have been testing their water via free lead-testing kits that were distributed by the thousands. That being said, the results that were brought in have been damning.
Amid renewed national attention to the dangers of lead poisoning, hundreds of Chicagoan's have taken the city up on its offer of free testing kits to determine if they are drinking tap water contaminated with the brain-damaging metal.
A Tribune analysis of the results shows lead was found in water drawn from nearly 70 percent of the 2,797 homes tested during the past two years. Tap water in 3 of every 10 homes sampled had lead concentrations above 5 parts per billion, the maximum allowed in bottled water by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Alarming amounts of the toxic metal turned up in water samples collected throughout the city, the newspaper’s analysis found, largely because Chicago required the use of lead service lines between street mains and homes until Congress banned the practice in 1986.
The testing kit results provide the most conclusive evidence yet of widespread hazards that have remained hidden for decades. Yet as Mayor Rahm Emanuel borrows hundreds of millions of dollars to overhaul the city’s public water system, Chicago is keeping lead service lines in the ground. Is that strange or is that just plain mysterious?
According to Chicago Tribune residents have been advised as follows:
City and EPA officials advise that residents can protect themselves by flushing household plumbing for three to five minutes when water hasn’t been used for several hours. But in one of five Chicago homes tested since January 2016, the Tribune analysis found, samples contained high levels of lead after water had been running for three minutes.
Even after water had been running for five minutes, 9 percent of the homes tested had lead levels above the FDA’s bottled water standard.
Prompted by concerns raised by the water crisis in Flint, Mich., and an EPA study of Chicago homes published in 2013, the city water department began distributing lead-testing kits to residents on request.
The kits included three sample bottles: one for water drawn after household taps have not been used for at least six hours, another for a sample collected after three minutes and the third after five minutes.
Block-level results are posted on a city-sponsored website that hadn’t been updated in more than six months before the Tribune began asking questions about the testing kits.
As you can see, there is not much being done about this issue and even now the people in Flint have all but been forgotten as they have been without clean drinking water for several YEARS now.
And while officials claim their crisis is over, most are not convinced. Could this become the same situation? It sure does sound like it. For the longest, these results were not even released as it seems covering things up and pushing things off is all that our =government can do.
That in itself is a whole new ballpark. This is a much bigger issue than you think. What is going on?
One of the homes with the highest levels found so far is Jenny Abrahamian’s bungalow on the city’s Northwest Side.
The full article can be found here:
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