How Political Clout And Union Power Created Chicago’s Lead Water Problem

Curious City

WBEZ Chicago

Society & Culture, Education, Public, Chicago, Arts, City, Radio, Curious, Investigation

4.8 • 642 Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2018

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Chicago continued to use lead pipes long after many cities banned them. We look at the politics and personalities behind it.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region, and investigate, report.
0:07.6	Explore.
0:08.5	From WBEZ.
0:13.8	Hey, I'm Curious City reporter Monica A.
0:17.1	This week, we've got a question about something we've talked about before, lead in Chicago's water.
0:22.8	Even at low doses, lead can hurt kids' brains, causing issues with attention, IQ, and violence.
0:29.7	It can also cause heart disease in adults.
0:32.3	And that's a problem, because according to city officials, about 80% of Chicago homes are hooked up to lead pipes.
0:39.3	So curious city questioners want to know, how did we get here?
0:43.3	Why do we have so many lead water pipes?
0:46.3	To get the answer, you have to start in the mid-1800s.
0:50.3	When Chicago was doing what most American cities were doing, using a lot of this wonder material called lead.
0:58.1	When we built our cities, we put it into everything.
1:01.0	That's Columbia University Public Health Professor David Rosner.
1:04.7	We put it into our walls. We put it into our plumbing.
1:08.2	We put it into our fixtures.
1:09.7	We put it into our sewage systems.
1:11.9	Rosner wrote a book called Lead Wars. He says plumbers loved lead pipes because they were
1:16.3	durable and easy to bend. Plus, only licensed plumbers could install them. And at the time,
1:21.9	people didn't think lead was that bad for you. By the early part of the 20th century, things changed. Scientists published
1:30.6	articles about the health risks from lead. Here's lead researcher Richard Rabin.
1:35.1	There were just too many voices out there among the public health people saying this is a bad
	...

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