At its current pace, the city’s project to replace lead water lines in Chicago’s Southside neighborhoods could take two centuries. Researchers at Northwestern University and community activists are bringing lead water tests to the Southeast Side residents.

There was little surprise when East Side Resident Earlene Malachinski received a note from the Chicago Department of Water Management (DWM) notifying her that lead lines feed her faucets. As a lifelong resident of the area, Malchinski has come to expect pollutants in her environment. “We’ve had all kinds of industry here. We never know from day-to-day what’s taking place,” Malachinski said. “We’re the child of lack of justice for a community for sure.”

Malachinski, 70, has lived in her current home, just east of the Calumet River, for nearly 40 years. Like most houses in the area it is old, built in the early 1960s in an era of Chicago’s history when installing lead pipes wasn’t just standard practice, it was a requirement.

Chicago has the most lead water service lines of any city in the United States with estimates of over 400,000 to date. Years after most cities had transitioned to using other materials, Chicago continued to mandate the use of lead pipes until a 1986 EPA ruling banned the practice. Even Cleveland, the city with the second most lead service lines at around 235,000, stopped installing lead lines in the 1950s.

The legacy of pre-1986 construction has left neighborhoods across the city vulnerable to lead poisoning through water pipelines. City leadership has continually stalled in addressing this issue. As recently as April of this year, city of Chicago plans outline a 50 year timeline for replacing all lead service lines, in spite of a recent EPA mandate that would give Chicago closer to 2047 to complete the task.

This inaction is not felt equally across Chicago. Those living in affluent North Side neighborhoods are more financially empowered to identify and replace lead lines. In the Southeast Side, where some of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago are located and median home age predates 1950 per U.S. Census data, residents are among the most vulnerable and least prioritized in the city.

At Northwestern University’s Center for Synthetic Biology, a team of researchers are putting a spotlight on the issue of lead contamination in the Southeast Side. They have developed an at-home testing kit to reveal lead concentrations in water, offering the ability to quickly and accurately assess individual risk. Their pilot program, which looks to understand how well these tests perform in the hands of everyday users, is focusing on Southeast Side homes, including Malachinski’s.

“My biggest interest is to let people educate themselves about what’s in their water so they can make informed decisions,” said Vanessa Bly, a Research Coordinator with Northwestern’s study. “I feel like that’s the way you create powerful people.”

Bly grew up on the Southeast Side and now works as an activist with her organization Bridges//Puentes, a social justice collective which she helped found in 2020. Bly initially became aware of Northwestern’s project as a community advisory board member. After a few meetings, she was inspired to bring these tests to her community by joining the study as a research coordinator. “Communities like ours are the ones that need this the most. You have old houses, old pipes. You’re the ones that need to know what’s going on.”

Northwestern’s kits have the familiar look of a COVID-19 rapid test, showing results through thin red lines on reactive strips. They rely on biosensors that mimic the natural reactions of bacteria to detect harmful chemicals. Modified specifically to react with lead, these tests can provide gold-standard quality results that other at-home tests fail to meet.

“We recognized that there was a bit of a gap in what’s available from a water quality monitoring standpoint,” said Tyler Lucci, a chemical and biological engineering postdoctoral researcher with Northwestern. “A lot of the water quality tests, the gold-standard methods, are very time consuming, they’re expensive and an everyday person doesn’t usually have access.”

While Chicago residents can submit a Water Lead Test Kit Request to the DWM to test their water for free, the process is lengthy and requires sending samples off to a lab for analysis. Simply receiving materials to collect a water sample can take a month, by which time many users lose interest – at best, about 50% of ordered kits are never returned. Results take additional 6-8 weeks to be delivered.

Northwestern’s test takes less than 30 minutes, no postage stamp required.

Other resources to identify lead exposure, like the DWM’s Water Service Line Inventory that tracks known lead lines in the city, are incomplete and lack insight on the extent of lead contamination at the household level.

Knowing if and how much lead is in one’s water is an important first step in tackling this issue. As Southeast Side residents wait for the government to step in and replace the lead pipe infrastructure beneath their streets, accurate lead testing can open the door to proactive interventions like using water filters or even seeing if their homes qualify for the Equity Lead Service Line Replacement Program based on income.

“It’s hard to get people to believe there’s a problem when you can’t detect it,” Bly said. Prioritizing this issue can be especially difficult in the Southeast Side where there is no shortage of more visible injustices competing for attention. “We have a lot of other things that are happening. Thing about lead is it’s invisible. You can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t taste it.”

Malachinski is quick to point out the economic impacts of loss of industry, still felt 40 years after the steel mills that employed much of the area shut down. Meanwhile the residue of industrial waste continues to poison her neighborhood. “In this neighborhood it’s been ‘pick one’ kind of thing.”

Many choose to leave rather than investing in improvements. According to a 2022 report by the University of Illinois Chicago, nearly all of Chicago’s population loss in the last 30 years came from neighborhoods in the South Side, with almost 185,000 leaving the area. Those like Malachinski, however, are committed to standing their ground and demanding more attention from city governance. “This community has been around a long time. It’s done well for the city of Chicago,” she said. “We deserve to get better.”

By focusing Northwestern’s pilot study in this community, Bly hopes to escalate action on one of the rare environmental injustices that impacts both North and South Side residents. “Being able to give people resources right now that they can use to protect themselves and their families is the most important thing that we can do with this study, with the lead crisis in Chicago,” she says.

This crisis will not end anytime soon. At the current pace of progress, even the city’s 50 year timeline is a stretch. With less than 8,000 replacements made over the last four years, it would take about 200 years to update all lead lines if nothing accelerates.

“There’s gotta be a way to do it faster,” Bly said in response to the prospective 50 year timeline. “Maybe with the power of educating people in their own homes, maybe something could be done quicker.”

Additional Reporting by Christiana Freitag and Frances Mack.