Lead found in tap water in hundreds of homes tested across Chicago

CHICAGO - Amid renewed national attention to the dangers of lead poisoning, hundreds of Chicagoans have taken the city up on its offer of free testing kits to determine if they are drinking tap water contaminated with the brain-damaging metal.

A Chicago Tribune analysis of the results shows lead was found in water drawn from nearly 70 percent of the 2,797 homes tested during the past two years. Tap water in 3 of every 10 homes sampled had lead concentrations above 5 parts per billion, the maximum allowed in bottled water by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Alarming amounts of the toxic metal turned up in water samples collected throughout the city, the newspaper's analysis found, largely because Chicago required the use of lead service lines between street mains and homes until Congress banned the practice in 1986.

The testing kit results provide the most conclusive evidence yet of widespread hazards that have remained hidden for decades. Yet as Mayor Rahm Emanuel borrows hundreds of millions of dollars to overhaul the city's public water system, Chicago is keeping lead service lines in the ground.

Under the city's plumbing code - the same ordinance that for nearly a century