Maria Ines Zamudio:

So that was one of the other really startling realities of our investigation is that we analyzed a shutoff notices and each one of the six cities that we investigated and we found that this shutoff notices were disproportionately concentrated in mostly poor black and Latino neighborhoods. In Chicago for example, you have to pay an additional forty dollars to get your water reconnected. You have to get in a payment plan if you can't afford to pay the entire balance. And on top of that, you pay interest on the amount owed. So we during the course of the reporting we found that a lot of poor families get trapped in this cycle of trying to keep the water on and having to pay additional fees. We found that the city of Chicago charged about seven million dollars in fines and fees. And so those fines and fees were also concentrated in poor mostly poor neighborhoods and Chicago at the root of this is an aging infrastructure.