A rain garden manages stormwater runoff in Philadelphia’s Germantown section. Philadelphia Water Department
Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia’s favorite son, described his city’s stormwater problem well: By “covering a ground plot with buildings and pavements, which carry off most of the rain and prevent its soaking into the Earth and renewing and purifying the Springs … the water of wells must gradually grow worse, and in time be unfit for use as I find has happened in all old cities.”
When he wrote this in 1789, many of Philadelphia’s water sources, the scores of streams that ran into the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers, were already cesspools of household and industrial waste. As they became intolerable eyesores and miasmic health hazards, the city simply covered them with brick arches, turned the streams into sewers, and on top constructed new streets, an expanding impervious landscape that left the rains with even fewer places for “soaking into the Earth.”
Crude as it was, this network of underground-to-riverfront outfalls through ever-larger pipes was pretty much the way Philadelphia and other U.S. cities coped with their stormwater for the next 200 years. But Ben Franklin’s town has decided to take the lead in undoing this ever-more […]
Full article: With a Green Makeover, Philadelphia Is Tackling Its Stormwater Problem
More about pollution and the health of our rivers:
The Death of the Delaware River
With Green Makeover, Philadelphia Tackles Its Stormwater Problem
Where’s The Fresh Water Going?
New York City’s $1 Billion Leaking Water Infrastructure Repair
WWF Report Explores Rivers’ Less Valued Benefits
Interfaith Leaders From Across The World Pledge To Protect Rivers, Glaciers
