By: Danica Fedosh
In East Chicago, a small town in Indiana, the soil in the community is contaminated with lead. Some lawns are having lead levels above 45,000 parts per million. To show the extremity of the situation, the federal limit is 400 parts per million. Because of the condition of the soil, the chemicals have also affected the drinking water. Out of 43 tested homes, 30 of them, 12 homes after the evacuation and 18 prior, had 15 parts or more per million of lead in the drinking water. What could be worse than everything around you being contaminated with a chemical that could kill you at any moment? A chemical that poisons your children. It was found that 20% of children under age seven in the community had more than 5 micrograms per deciliter of lead in their bloodstreams.
Low-income communities are predominantly affected by water crises due to housing being built on former industrial sites that haven’t been properly mitigated or the improper maintenance of water systems that allow lead to leach into the water at crisis levels. Out of the many cities in the United States, at least 33 have issues with lead in the drinking water.
The East Chicago community is located on land that used to be the USS Lead Superfund Site. The USS Lead facility closed in 1985 after it was found that it affected surrounding areas. No clean-up effort or soil tests were attempted until 2014 by the government officials, and even then city officials didn’t have access to the soil until 17 months later.
Residents have come up with alternatives to using the contaminated water, like buying gallons of water from stores as opposed to using the state-provided water filter, but they still have a frightening amount of mental stress. The residents live in constant fear of lead poisoning with daily tasks such as showering. There is also the worry of if the blood contamination will affect children’s development growth, although officials say it’s too soon to tell. Tenants of West Calumet Housing Complex were all evicted so the building site could be demolished, this way the lead could be properly dealt with.
To help work toward a solution to fix the issue, National Nurses United and East Chicago Calumet Coalition Community Advisory Group petitioned for EPA to “use its emergency powers under the Safe Drinking Water Act … to take action to abate the imminent and substantial endangerment to human health caused by lead contamination in East Chicago’s drinking water.” Director of the National Resources Defense Council’s Health and Environment Program, Erik Olsen, mentioned the water situation in Chicago when he gave testimony at “Reinvestment and Rehabilitation of Our Nation’s Safe Drinking Water Delivery Systems”, which is a hearing in Washington D.C. to discuss similar water issues in the city. By making more people aware of the difficulties that have landed the community in some hot water, the issue becomes more well known and more steps can be taken to correct this and prevent a recurrence from happening in other cities.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced a plan to combat the city’s 400,000 service lines containing lead. Lightfoot’s plan entails replacing the lead service pipes in the city with lead-free service pipes, costing around $8.5 billion from start to finish. The plan decrees that the city will start with replacing somewhere between 400 to 800 in low-income neighborhoods in the first year. While this is progress, considering Mayor Lightwood is tackling a task never taken before, but at just under 800 pipes replaced in the first year, to complete the whole project, it’ll take over 500 years at this rate.
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