Here's the next case. Except this one isn't really a case. It's a law.
In 1985 the city of Chicago still required, by municipal code, that new water service lines from the main to the house be made of lead. Not permitted. Required. If a plumber tried to install copper, he was in violation of the code. The city wanted lead. The city had always wanted lead. The Chicago Plumbing Code had mandated lead service lines since early in the twentieth century, the lead pipe industry had good lobbyists, and through the 70s and 80s the federal agencies that might have pushed back were still getting their science in order. Nothing changed. Until 1986, when the Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments made new lead service lines illegal nationwide.
So anyone whose house was connected to the Chicago water main before 1986 has a lead service line, by law. Approximately four hundred thousand homes. Still in the ground. Still in service. Still the only path the water takes from the main to the kitchen faucet.
The hazard was required. That's the part nobody mentions.
When we tell these stories we usually tell them like there's a villain. A factory in China. A negligent importer. A landlord who didn't paint over the old paint. Chicago's lead pipes aren't a villain story. They're a law story. Every plumber who installed one was compliant. Every inspector who signed off on one was compliant. Every city engineer who specified lead in the blueprint was compliant. Doing your job meant installing it.
Which is why this one gets under my skin.
Because somewhere across all those endpoint jobs, the EPA agent who sets the water-lead action level, the city utility that issues the annual consumer-confidence report, the pediatrician who runs the BLL when a first-grader won't focus in school, the state investigator who shows up to test the paint and the dust, somewhere in that stack there was supposed to be a person who could say this is required by law and the law should not exist.
That person does not have a job description. There is no CIA for lead. There is OSHA for your job, EPA for your outdoor air and water, CPSC for your toys, FDA for your food, HUD for your paint, and thirty different state and city departments each running frontline work with no shared budget, no shared database, and nobody whose entire mandate is primary prevention. The primary-prevention role doesn't exist. It never existed. The federal 1986 ban on new lead pipes happened because an extraordinary legislative push forced it to, not because any standing agency was doing primary prevention in the course of ordinary business.
Everyone handling lead on the national map is an endpoint job.
Secondary prevention is a beautiful discipline and I have great respect for the people who do it. But secondary prevention cannot tell a city to rip out four hundred thousand lead service lines. All it can do is wait for the blood test, then trace, then document.
That's what the rest of this book is going to be about.
You can catch it with a flashlight and spray bottle in your hands.
Test your stuff. Move on.
Glow-based primary lead detection, direct from the manufacturer.
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