Water service lines once were routinely made of lead, a toxic metal that can contaminate drinking water, causing serious health risks for residents. There are millions of these pipes across the United States, but no city has more than Chicago, where plumbers were required to install lead pipes until a national ban in 1986, long after experts warned they were unsafe.
I began looking into Chicago’s lead pipes in early 2025 after I met an environmental justice organizer who worried about how the lead service line in her home would impact her young children. A lifelong resident of Chicago’s far South Side, she wanted to know if her neighborhood, already overburdened by industrial pollution, is also more at risk from lead pipes.
I teamed up with ICN data reporter Peter Aldhous, and we joined forces with two other newsrooms—Grist and WBEZ Chicago—to investigate Chicago’s lead pipes and to empower residents with crucial information about their drinking water.
We revealed, through five articles published over six months, that Chicago is decades behind in meeting federal deadlines in its plans to replace the toxic pipes and that the city missed a federal deadline to notify residents about the risks, leaving more than 90 percent of impacted households in the dark. Our reporting prompted city aldermen to swiftly call a hearing to question the water department on its delays.
For our biggest story, we set out to answer my source’s question about neighborhood disparities in lead plumbing. Peter led the analysis of a city database, which we obtained through multiple public record requests. He meticulously geocoded and mapped more than 491,000 service line addresses alongside poverty and race data. The analysis revealed that lead pipes are widespread across Chicago, and Black and Latino communities bear the largest burden.
Our newsrooms worked together to create the first public resource for Chicago residents to visualize where the lead pipe problem is most severe and how their neighborhoods are impacted. We also built an easy-to-use search tool for people to look up the pipe material at their own home, in both English and Spanish.
The lookup tool includes information on how to request a free water-testing kit from the city and how to apply for government programs for subsidized pipe replacement. The day after we published our mapping tool, nearly 900 testing kits were requested, more than 20 times the usual number, and requests stayed high for days. Within a week of publication, our map lookup tool had been used more than 85,000 times.
We also collaborated with City Bureau, a local newsroom focused on civic engagement, to create an online safety guide for residents with lead pipes, and to host an in-person “public newsroom” event to explain our findings.
Our lead pipe series was recognized by the judges of the 2026 Society of Environmental Journalists Awards, who called it “a model of public-service data journalism.” We see it as a testament to collaborative investigative journalism. Safe drinking water is critical for public health, and ICN is committed to continuing our coverage on lead pipes.
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