Underneath Forest Park, miles of service lines carry potable water from Chicago’s water main to the village’s homes and businesses. But many of these aging pipes are made out of lead, a toxic metal that can be harmful to humans, especially children, if it is ingested in drinking water.
Although cities like Chicago often add phosphates to the water, coating the pipes to prevent lead from leaching into the water, in the past few years, officials have ramped up efforts to replace them.
Last year, the Biden Administration required the replacement of all the country’s lead pipes within the next decade. And in 2021, Gov. JB Pritzker signed a bill requiring Illinois to replace lead service lines. Federal EPA data shows that Illinois has the second-highest number of lead pipes in the nation — more than 690,000 of them — and it’s the third state in the country, following Michigan and New Jersey, to have such a law.
At the Forest Park council meeting March 25, four commissioners and Mayor Rory Hoskins voted to accept bids for this year’s lead service replacement project, an ongoing effort in the village. All five also voted to approve the execution of the village’s application for the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency’s lead service line inventory grant.
It’s a similar grant to the one the village got last year, when the IEPA awarded Forest Park a $2.35 million forgivable loan to continue the replacement of its lead service lines in 2024.
Forest Park started replacing its lead service lines with copper ones nearly a decade ago, when Sal Stella, now the village’s director of public works, was working in the water department. Yearly, the department would replace lead pipes with copper ones, up to a property’s parkway, leaving the ones that go up to homes.
But the village gave homeowners incentives of free water meters and waived permitting fees to replace the parts of the service lines that are a part of their property. As the water department replaced service lines two blocks at a time, Stella estimated that over 50 homes in every two blocks participated in the incentives.
The IEPA grant received last year, along with the 2021 bill, required the village to also replace the portion of service lines connecting to homes and businesses, rather than the pipes from the water mains.
The grant will also fund Christopher Burke Engineering to analyze the village’s service lines and determine how many lead pipes the village still has to replace. Since Gov. Pritzker signed the bill in 2021, villages and cities must report to the IEPA the number of lead sources in their community.
There’s roughly 2,300 service lines that still need to be replaced. According to the village lead line inventory, Forest Park has 3,399 water lines, 1,100 of which are lead and 1,438 that are partial lead lines. But for nearly a decade, Forest Park has worked toward updating them.
Stella said, “Forest Park has always been proactive in helping the community upgrade to copper.”
