Removing Lead Laterals - Still a Pipe Dream?

By Get the Lead Out Coalition Members

If you watched the short docu-campaign video from More Perfect Union, you saw Mandela Barnes walk us through the progress being made in Milwaukee to remove dangerous lead pipes using funds from the Biden Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. We feel it’s a little early for a victory lap, especially when the video glosses over the fact that in the ten years since Flint made lead tainted water national news, Democrats have been in control of the City of Milwaukee, the whole time. These same Democrats are breaking their arms patting themselves on the back for using Biden’s money to remove the lead pipes. But when it was our own money, city leaders were content to let our children risk exposure for 70 more years.

Since Flint, which by the way, was not what ignited the discussion about lead laterals in Milwaukee, but more on that later, Get the Lead Out, a grassroots coalition of many partner organizations throughout the city of Milwaukee, has called upon city leaders to remove lead laterals at no cost to homeowners. The mission of our coalition is simple: stop harming our citizens with lead pipes that the city forced residents to use in the first place.

While we believe that anything that helps get these poison pipes out of our infrastructure is a positive effort, the documentary attempts to put a happy spin on what has been a disastrously slow removal process, while conveniently ignoring the role city leaders played in putting those lead pipes into our communities in the first place. There is no discussion of the incompetence shown by city leaders in even meeting their own dangerous and ridiculous timeline of 70 years to remove 70,000 lead laterals.  Since Flint, city leaders, including the ones currently sitting there in their city hall offices, have met with frontline groups who have been begging the city to hasten the timeline of removal from 70 years to 10 years or less. To understand just how silly this video seems to us, we need to share a bit of Wisconsin history.

Why are there lead pipes in the first place!? We have known since at least the first century before the common era that lead was bad for our health. Vitruvius, an ancient Roman architect, knew full well that when water was delivered in lead pipes, people got sick. In fact, the dangers of lead were well known by many people throughout history right up until 1838, when Harrison, Lewis, Nelson, and James Ludington arrived on the Milwaukee scene. This family ran various businesses in tandem with each other in typical rich capitalist style, and keeping with the times, took up business in lead mining, transport, and processing (from Wisconsin Session Laws of 1868, Chapter 276).  This added to their diverse and lucrative portfolio, which already included speculative real estate and railroad investing (from History of Milwaukee, City and County Volume 1, Bruce 1922). Lead mining was big business, and actually had been an important part of the fur trade since the 1700s, but when the federal government began their official efforts to commit genocide in the name of westward expansion, so called Manifest Destiny, the white bourgeoisie, like the Ludingtons, saw their opportunity to make a land grab since it became clear that the US government, was actively helping move land from Indigenous people into the hands of white, capitalist developers. Capitalist exploitation of our planet always involves the displacement of different groups. In Wisconsin, as late as 1842, enslaved Black people were forced to labor in lead mines. From these mines, which were a joint venture of the Ludingtons and the State of Wisconsin, which existed on stolen land, worked by enslaved people, the raw lead was moved by Ludington’s wagon transport company to Milwaukee, where it was made into railroad ties by another Ludington family company (from History of Milwaukee, City and County Volume 1, Bruce 1922). This arrangement went on for a while, and then the railroads were built through their new land and their business really took off. The Ludingtons, like all capitalists, grew their wealth without even trying. In fact, they got so rich that they were able to influence policy and buy their way into the Milwaukee mayor’s office, which proved to be one of Harrison Ludington’s most lucrative business ventures.

Now, the Ludington’s own a lot of valuable land, a lot of real estate, and can set city policy. They use this to continue to enrich themselves at a time when Milwaukee is starting to consolidate. In 1871, while Harrison Ludington was mayor, he established the Milwaukee Water Works. Ludington should get credit for spearheading the project of consolidating city sewer and water services, which is a progressive step. However, in a very unsurprising twist, Ludington enriched himself while in office by having the newly formed Milwaukee Water Works mandate that any home that wanted to connect to the new water lines that would be delivering fresh water right to people’s homes were required to use pipes made out of, you guessed it, lead.

So, a lot of houses that were built, or that were owned by the Ludingtons (remember they had purchased a bunch of real estate) were about to be connected to water lines by lead pipes created in Ludington’s factory using lead ore delivered by railroads that were made with ties from Ludington’s factory and run through land owned by the Ludingtons from their state-supported lead mining operation. All the while, these charlatans were avoiding paying their fair share of taxes by moving their real estate holdings to their family members and friends. In July 1936 the city took responsibility for half of the lateral, the city now could gain access in case of break to make repairs, however once it passed the curb of your street, you owned it and had to pay for it.

Fast forward a bit, and the public at large starts to become aware of a real environmental risk caused by lead exposure. Lead was added to so many products to make them more durable. Lead was added to gasoline to help engines run smoothly, paint to make it dry faster, ceramic to make the finish shinier, jewelry to give it heft and make it seem fancier. But as time went on, it became hard to ignore science about lead poisoning. As early as the 1920s, municipal governments were starting to ban the use of lead pipes and were met with fierce opposition from the Lead Industries Association, a group that would go on to lobby governments to continue to use lead pipes as late as 1959. In that same year, a tenant in a Milwaukee apartment building sued the city for health concerns related to lead laterals and the Lead Industries Association started to get really worried about people finding out that they’d been lied to for a century and that their government had colluded with lead miners to knowingly poison them for money.

Like all lobbyists, they fought with all their might and money until they met an immovable object, the EPA. The EPA was started because it was becoming harder to ignore what toxic chemicals in our environment were doing.  The Cuyahoga River burned on the nightly news for all the country to see in 1969. The EPA was starting to take a hard look at lead and other toxic chemicals in our environment, and started informing legislation on safe drinking water in the mid-1970s. Still, even today, the federal government does not require any homeowner to retrofit their homes with lead free plumbing, even when the homeowner is a large commercial firm who could afford to do so. 

In the 1970s, it was well known that many cities around the US had lead laterals because it had only been 15 years since they were commonly installed as an everyday plumbing product in most big cities. This is a problem that happened across the US because the lead lobby was everywhere and was a powerful influence. 

In the 1970s and 1980s, people started to find lead everywhere. A problem that once only was found in slums and tenements was now impacting rich people. Putting lead in paint and gasoline meant it became a fine dust that settled on everything, including soil. Slowly, the federal government did away with lead additives and the big lead lobby was finally bested. But the problem remained, and Regan Republicans decided that the removal of the millions of lead laterals was not work for the feds, but for the cities to manage without any further federal oversight. 

In the nineties, the city faced a huge problem related to water with the cryptosporidium outbreak. This was the largest waterborne illness in US history, and while most people who became sick from contaminated water recovered, for 69 people, the outbreak was deadly. This outbreak was initially reported to the Milwaukee Health Department by a local pharmacist who noticed an uptick in gastrointestinal illnesses. His initial complaints were ignored, so he did what any reasonable person would do, he went public. He contacted the news and when they aired the story, hundreds of people recognized themselves as among the afflicted and the city was forced to take action. The initial response was to advise citizens to boil their water to kill the microorganism that was causing so much illness. But in the case of lead, boiling actually concentrates the lead,  making the toxic burden worse. In an effort to save people from a potentially deadly illness, they put other people further in harm's way. At least we can see direct action at work, share the truth with the public and see how the situation changes when citizens take their power back. The people of Milwaukee should be proud of the quick action of the pharmacist, turned advocate, for not being ignored and speaking on behalf of the city!

This outbreak resulted in a public distrust of the Milwaukee Water Works, and why not? Their error had resulted in the infection of 400,000 people and the death of 69. Subsequently, Milwaukee invested over 500 million dollars (would be worth about a billion today) to improve our water quality, and in a full swing of the pendulum, our water supply became something to be proud of. Milwaukee made a name for itself as a city with a shining gem of a municipal water treatment system. 

Then, the water is sullied by lead laterals in Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods. The issue of lead laterals once again became a one-off situation, when a child was tested for lead in their blood, high results were considered in isolation instead of systemically. First, inspectors started by looking at the environment for obvious sources of lead like chipping paint in old homes. But something happened in 2015, people started noticing that after a summer with a record-breaking number of water main breaks, many children were testing high for blood lead levels. Then Alderman Joe Davis took notice, and brought it to the city. Mayor Tom Barrett did his best to sweep the issue back under the rug, and the city decided that the narrative they would use was, “It’s the paint.” 

The city’s official stance was that the source of lead poisoning was lead paint in older homes. This was a convenient position because landlords were already aware that they needed to disclose lead paint, and tenants are informed that there is lead paint in the home. Federal law does not require landlords or homeowners to remove the lead paint, but if a child is found to have elevated levels of lead in their blood, the state of Wisconsin may require that a landlord remove or remediate the area in 30 days or less. More often than not, tenants are not aware of their rights or the risks until they find out that their child has been poisoned. And when we speak of lead remediation, that could mean anything from safely abating the lead paint by removing it, or simply painting over the problem, and we have all seen the landlord special paint jobs.

This information came out about the same time as the crisis in Flint, where municipal water had previously been drawn from the Detroit River, but due to possible river contamination with Legionella, the city made a fateful choice to draw water from the Flint River instead of improving their filtration system to remove the bacteria. The water from the Flint River caused the internal corrosion of the city pipes to flake off, letting the lead from the outer portion of the pipe to leach into the water, resulting in the poisoning of tens of thousands of children.  Citizens sued the city and forced them to be accountable for their short-sighted decisions. As a result of these actions, there are fewer than 500 lead laterals left in Flint. COLE Director Rick Diaz says in the documentary that the Flint leaders eventually passed the costs of removing their lead laterals off on residents in the form of higher water bills to repay loans that the city had to take on to fund the cost of lead lateral abatement. While this is frustrating and unjust, we should spare no expense in removing a known toxin from our city’s drinking water. A citizen oversight committee is essential to ensuring that Milwaukee leaders don’t try and get away with something similar when Biden’s infrastructure money dries up, which it will. We should learn from history, and history tells us that our elected officials can, and often do, use their public offices for personal gain. That’s how we got here in the first place. Remember Luddington, that greedy capitalist mayor governor, we need to pay close attention when the stakes are high, and that means when it comes to our health and water, essential for all life on earth.

It just so happened that this crisis pushed the idea of lead laterals back into the mainstream after a long time of city complacency. Alderman Joe Davis reached out to some community activists after being stonewalled by the city who was determined to continue the narrative that the water that comes into our homes is safe to drink, but it’s the paint that’s the problem. When activists showed up at common council meetings to demand action, the city had the audacity to exclaim that the activists were actually “paint lobbyists.” In fact, FLAC and Get the Lead Out do not receive funding from anywhere, we are grassroots volunteers and the few minor expenses we have come from, well us. The City of Milwaukee continued to repeat the narrative that lead paint is the primary cause of lead poisoning in our city. Milwaukee has repeated this narrative for decades. However, when GTLO challenged this narrative, our 2017 research uncovered that Milwaukee never tested for lead in water during environmental home assessments after a house was determined to be the cause of lead poisoning of children. Instead, they made assumptions that the paint was the problem. When GTLO pressed the city for data, the city could not produce hard local data, opting instead to cite national trend data as its primary source for its narrative. 

In 2020, after the release of an audit completed by the Public Health Foundation, which was conducted after the failure of the city’s previous lead prevention program, it was revealed that Milwaukee was using insufficient data to make the claim that paint was the problem and that water was not. In fact, no studies were conducted to determine what role lead in water was playing in the lead poisoning of Milwaukee’s children. Milwaukee’s narrative then, and to this day, is built on a foundation as rotten as the lead laterals, claiming lead paint was and still is the main problem, despite no evidence and a lack of peer reviewed studies to determine local primary causes of lead poisoning in Milwaukee.

Imagine that. Instead of the city deciding that they had the same problem as every other city of its size and age in the US, they were holding the line on lead laterals, again, Milwaukee is dead last, disappointing leadership to say the least. They even sued, and won, then lost on appeal, for reparations against paint giants such as Sherwin Williams.  Still, kids kept getting sick, and the Freshwater for Life Action Coalition (FLAC) was born. Alderman Davis was running against incumbent Tom Barrett for mayor and used the lead pipes as his platform and was sharing information with FLAC in an effort to raise awareness of the city’s willful neglect of this known, lasting problem with a simple solution: remove the lead laterals and stop poisoning our children. The City of  Milwaukee seems to have a plan to continue hoodwinking its citizens by using national trend data and ignoring their role in this massive problem. We need to understand that now is not the time to try to sort this out in committee, the poisoning of children is happening right now, this very moment, as you read this.

An ironic moment in the documentary is when Mandela Barnes asks: “In the richest country in the world, why do millions of people still drink water contaminated with lead? And who has gotten in the way of our government cleaning it up?” The answer is THEM. They, themselves, are the ones who created the problem. As a continuous organization, it was the city’s responsibility to clean this up all along. Nobody wants to be the politician in office who assumes responsibility for spending city money to remove poisonous infrastructure. They make policy decisions to avoid accountability all the time, it’s pathological. It is hard to accept, but the city simply chose to ignore the problem until the EPA ruled that cities had to remove the lead laterals in ten years or less, a mandate that will become law in October of 2024. Do not be fooled, the city is not doing this out of the goodness of their heart, they are doing this by the skin of their teeth as the last major city in our area to undertake this important task, and still the work is behind pace already and as usual. The mayor, Cavalier Johnson, reported his 20-year timeline plan last year, and thanks to the Biden Infrastructure grant, now Milwaukee could at least start the work. The city is underfunded, on purpose, by racist state politicians, meaning that the oldest, poorest neighborhoods in Milwaukee, and in every city really, will continue to be poisoned by lead. 

Even COLE, the city’s own organization, could not accept a 60-year timeline, which everyone deemed ridiculous. Trump’s disastrous policies and woeful scientific ignorance meant that the city was off the hook for any removal because federally, there were no laws or mandates spurring any spending and progress, and there are no national news stories about Milwaukee’s water crisis right now. We got our 15 minutes of fame during crypto and remember, the city spent a half a billion dollars to literally wipe the cow manure from its image. Since then, we are a great city on a great lake. People are proud of our municipal water supply, a wonderful socialist service.

The fact that this election cycle is fueled by that Biden Infrastructure Money, a nostrum for the population who sees removing poison pipes actual progress after being denied any infrastructure improvement for so long that these meager provisions seem glorious, the city will play this card to death. You will hear Mayor Johnson laud his new ten year plan at the next State of the City Address, “Look at how I am graciously listening to you now that the feds have said I have to do it anyway!” Do not be lulled, we need to keep our eye on the prize, removing the lead laterals in ten years or less.

Let’s not forget that for the past ten years, GTLO and other frontline groups have been saying this exact thing, we have to do whatever it takes to get the lead out in ten years or less. Now that we’re finally all on the same page, good on COLE for being able to finesse that line between government and public service, but for the rest of us we say, be wary. Be suspicious. The city put these poison pipes here, the city knew they were there for over one hundred years, and the city has declined to truly address the problem year after year. They are being made to do it now. So, by dumb luck of the election cycle, Milwaukee finally has the money to do this work, so we’d better make sure the work gets done!

Again, it’s too early for a victory lap. We have to demand public, community oversight because in no way does a leopard change its spots. Just like when Harrison Luddington became mayor, then governor of the state, elected officials have ignored this problem for ten years until they learned it is popular now to be anti-poisoning people. So if this issue disappears from the limelight, so will the political will to actually follow through. 

Here’s why you should demand community oversight. Because this means you can go and see exactly what people are up to, and you can hold them publicly accountable. Maybe you never want to attend a lead lateral removal committee meeting, but some of us do and will do a good job acting as watchdogs. Community oversight is the way that we let our elected officials know that they work for us, so no matter what, we want these lead pipes out in ten years or less.

It is getting harder and harder for communities to practice oversight over the officials we put in charge of handling critical public goods and services, we need to change that. The time is now to allow public oversight of public services!

Removing lead laterals should not be a partisan issue, and we intend to continue holding the city accountable to the public interest through grassroots, frontline organizing. If you are interested in getting involved with the Get The Lead Out coalition, please reach out to us. Click here to email the common council to let them know that you stand with children and families and to demand action. Or call your alderperson and talk to them about how important it is that all of our neighbors have access to clean and healthy water, click here to find their number. You can simply say, “I support the city’s plan to remove lead laterals in ten years or less. Can you tell me what the alderperson’s stance on this issue is?” If you have the time, let us know what they say!

Fighting for a Lead Free Milwaukee

We are a grassroots coalition of citizens and community organizations fighting for the removal of the toxic lead pipe infrastructure in Milwaukee. Our coalition believes it will require sustained pressure at the community level to demand that lead service lines be replaced. To date, the city has only offered half measures and deflections on this public health issue. We are asking concerned citizens to call or email City officials to demand that a comprehensive plan to remove the lead pipes as well as lead based paint and dust be developed and implemented.

Join us in building educational awareness around this issue, and ultimately building community power towards an environmentally just world that benefits us all.