Philly Leads East Coast With Environmentally Friendly Storm Sewer System

Philadelphia draws some praise from the Christian Science Monitor for using “green” strategies to keep rainwater from becoming polluted as it runs through the gutters and back into the creeks and rivers.

Green infrastructure mimics how nature handles rainwater through the use of porous surfaces, rather than impervious surfaces like roadways. These techniques are decentralized. Instead of one facility or large underground tank to store water when a big storm hits, the idea is to eliminate the need for such storage through the use of green rooftops, roadside plantings, carefully landscaped parks, rain gardens, rain barrels, and other swatches of nature dropped down inside the landscape of modern cities.

Green stormwater infrastructure means thousands of individual projects in big cities like New York or Philadelphia. The price tag — Philadelphia is spending around $3 billion, and the country as a whole needs something like $63 billion just in fixes to stormwater-related sewage overflows — is high. But advocates say going green is eventually a far more cost-effective method than constructing large wastewater treatment plants. Philadelphia and other cities are using city and federal funding to finance these green infrastructure projects.

Valessa Souter-Kline, a representative of the Philadelphia Water Department, says the decentralized concept of green infrastructure development represents a major challenge. “No one is saying ‘no’ to the idea,” says Souter-Kline, standing at the bottom of the rain garden in Womrath Park. “The issue is the scale. You just need so much of this.” On any given project, she says, the Philadelphia Water Department will likely have to work with the streets department, parks and recreation, utility companies, and other stakeholders.

The result? The paper says that “on the East Coast, Philadelphia is the clear frontrunner” in adopting green technologies for runoff.