It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region,

and investigate, report, explore, from WBEZ.

Hey, I'm Jeremy Borden with City Bureau, and I've got a story about dust.

It's everywhere in Chicago, and sometimes it can be dangerous.

Dust was on Robert Beatles' mine last spring when he was driving around McKinley Park on the southwest side.

That's his neighborhood.

He noticed something that disturbed him.

There was a demolition that happened about a half a block away from where my wife and I live,

and it just seemed like there was a lot of dust

being generated. The debris was kind of sitting in a pile for a while. They were loaded into a dumpster

with a backhoe and it was uncovered. The half-demolished house was ugly, sure. But what really

bothered him was that dust and how it was apparently just left there to spread.

Robert knows that homes in McKinley Park, like in many neighborhoods, often contain lead and asbestos in the walls, floors, and ceilings. He looked into it when he was planning a home

renovation, and he found out that he had to follow some fairly intimidating regulations

around contaminants, even for something as minor as installing a new ceiling

fan. So if that's the case, how was it that he watched a backhoe smash an old home to

smithereens in a matter of minutes, with, as far as Robert could tell, no effort made to contain that

dust, which probably had leaden asbestos in it. So we asked Curious City,

What are the regulations right now on demolitions and tear downs in Chicago, and are they strong

enough to protect the environment and human health? With Curious City and my City Bureau colleagues,

we set out to answer Robert's questions about the

current regulations for tearing down homes and whether they actually protect folks.

...