Chicago’s Department of Water Management will receive more than $22 million in federal funding to help replace lead pipes in the Austin neighborhood, U.S. Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin announced Wednesday.
The city was awarded a $22,119,933 grant to support approximately 650 lead service line replacements as part of ongoing efforts to remove lead from Chicago’s drinking water infrastructure.
“Lead in our drinking water, at any level, is a threat to our public health, particularly to children,” Durbin said in a statement. “And the lead pipes in Chicago, the most in any city in the nation, have posed a health risk for far too long. With this major investment, we can continue the critical work of ensuring Chicagoans have access to clean water when they turn on the tap.”
More than 3,000 properties in the neighborhood have tested above the current lead action limit of 15 parts per billion, according to Duckworth’s office. Duckworth said the grant will ensure families and children have access to safer, cleaner drinking water and will protect communities from health risks associated with lead exposure.
The announcement comes just weeks after Duckworth and Durbin announced more than $316 million in federal funding for clean water projects across Illinois. The funding included $295,551,000 for the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency’s Drinking Water State Revolving Fund and $21,335,000 through the EPA’s Emerging Contaminants in Small or Disadvantaged Communities grant program to help communities address PFAS and other emerging contaminants in their water systems.
Illinois has the most lead pipes in the country. The state estimates it has 667,000 known lead service lines and another 820,000 suspected lines. Chicago alone accounts for nearly 30% of those pipes.
In a 2022 report, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency found that a single service line replacement can cost anywhere from $4,000 to $13,000 across the state. In Chicago, the price tag is even higher. City officials estimated that replacements cost more than $30,000 per line on average.
State officials have estimated that replacing all the known or suspected lead pipes across Illinois could cost between $6 billion and $10 billion.
It was not immediately clear when the work would begin.