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Chicago has the most lead pipes in the nation

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102 points Brajeshwar | 1 comments | 31 Aug 25 01:27 UTC | HN request time: 0.258s | source
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SilverElfin ◴[31 Aug 25 02:08 UTC] No.45079701[source]▶
I wonder what the accuracy of the data is like. And what do you do about damaged pipes? I read that cities lose a lot of water to leaks. Doesn’t that also mean pollutants can get in? And it won’t matter if your pipe is lead or whatever else.

An aside: lead exposure is thought to lead to increase violence. I wonder if Chicago having the most lead pipes is also a contributing cause of their (reputed) crime problem.

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1. erosenbe0 ◴[03 Sep 25 05:45 UTC] No.45112572[source]▶
Median, normal lead exposure for toddlers in the 1960s and 1970s in any urban or suburban area would be 99th percentile by today's standards due to leaded gasoline vapors (and lack of awareness about paint dust).

So the crime hypothesis is more about baseline level of criminality being higher throughout the entire leaded gasoline era and for a few decades thereafter. It's generally framed as social science based on aggregate trends rather than individual dose-dependent epidemiological hypothesis.