Neal Santos
On the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) website, you can enter your street address and find out which watershed — and, therefore, which river — your drinking water is harvested from. But then, maybe you'd rather not know.
After all, your first option is the Schuylkill, which, according to the PWD's own Rivercast forecasting site, is unsafe for swimming about 40 percent of the time. The river is also threatened by upstream development that increases phosphorus, nitrogen and bacterial runoff during rainstorms, not to mention pharmaceuticals and other chemicals not adequately processed by upstream wastewater treatment plants.
On the other hand, there's the Delaware River, lined with increasingly dense development, as well as factories, oil refineries and shipping ports. Baxter, Philly's lone Delaware River water treatment plant, processes 60 percent of the city's drinking water, 200 million gallons a day. The 102-year-old plant is the last line of defense against a growing litany of threats to the Delaware: chemical pollution, nutrient runoff, the overflow of untreated sewage, seawater intrusion — and, perhaps soon, any byproducts of gas drilling in the Marcellus shale, which underlies 36 percent of the watershed.
Things used to be much worse. It took 60 years to clean up these two rivers: The Schuylkill once ran almost black with coal dust; and as recently as the 1940s the Delaware was an open sewer, a public health threat and a punch line. Back then, they say, you could smell the river from an airplane. It peeled the paint clean off boats and made dockworkers ill. FDR feared its fumes were corroding military radar installations in the river's estuary.
Now, a growing number of scientists, environmentalists and civic leaders worry that the rivers are under siege once again.
Depending on the results of a Nov. 21 meeting of the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), the interstate body that oversees the river, the end of a drilling moratorium could pave the way for some 15,000 wells to be scattered across the Delaware's watershed. Farther south, a dredging project that has environmentalists (and some mainstream politicians) enraged seems ready to resume, thanks to a $15 million funding infusion from the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority. That deepening, in turn, could be key to jumpstarting the planned Southport Marine Terminal project — which would fill in seven acres of wetlands and 33 acres of open water. Nearby, at the Philadelphia International Airport, expansion plans call for filling in another 24.5 acres of the river, plus more than 80 acres of wetlands. And those are just the major projects.
At an October waterways symposium, Gov. Tom Corbett summed up one way of looking at a river: not even as a commodity but as a means by which commodities can be got. It's a way of thinking that presumes a river, like a highway, can only benefit from being expanded or rerouted to suit traffic and development.
"If our country is a living body, these rivers are its veins. They connect our cities through industry. That's why we need to maintain them, to develop them," Corbett said. "Rivers aren't just flowing bodies of water. They are a ceaseless creator of jobs ... [and that] can continue as long as these rivers run free and deep.''
From Corbett's point of view, a river appears as a limitless economic resource rather than an ecosystem or even a vital source of drinking water (as the Delaware is for 15 million people) that merits vigilant protection.
Advocates say that's a philosophy that puts the river, and therefore our well-being, at risk.
Alyssa Grenning
A long-term shift in the salt line could turn our drinking water to brine.
In the 19th century, the Delaware River was not only the lifeblood of Philadelphia's shipping trade, but also host to an Atlantic sturgeon caviar industry that was, at its peak in the 1890s, the largest in the world.
But by the turn of the 20th century, that industry had all but disappeared, a victim of over-harvesting.
"People took very serious advantage of the river, to the point where the river started to die," says Maya van Rossum, head of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network.
With the Industrial Revolution, pollution of the Delaware began in earnest.
"By World War II, the horrible stinking condition of the river was a threat to national security," says Jonathan Sharp, a University of Delaware professor of oceanography. "It used to emanate a rotten-egg odor of hydrogen sulfide in the summer, because there was almost no oxygen in the water."
The stretch of the Delaware near Philly became a dead zone, and its confluence with the coal-clogged Schuylkill, where only seven species of fish survived, didn't help.
Only once the situation became untenable did government begin issuing and enforcing the laws that would chart the course for the river's slow, painful revival.
The river's flow was the first to be regulated, following interstate water wars in the early 20th century. Now, the Delaware is managed via controlled reservoir releases overseen by a U.S. Geological Survey-appointed Delaware River Master and by the DRBC.
Water quality improved later. The Clean Water Act in 1972 spurred important upgrades to municipal sewage treatment plants. And in 1992, the DRBC acted to protect the upper reaches of the river with a Special Protection Waters designation. As well, the PWD has implemented a proactive source water protection program to manage everything from upstream wastewater treatment to farming practices to the migration stops of geese.
Of course, improvement is relative. Sure, there are now 48 varieties of fish in the Schuylkill. But there are also, says van Rossum, more than a dozen species in the Delaware River Estuary that are too toxic to eat. And last October, the Atlantic sturgeon that spawn in the Delaware and Hudson rivers were proposed for listing as an endangered species. Dewayne Fox, a Delaware State University professor who has been studying the sturgeon, estimates that there are only about 300 left in the river.
"The tidal portion in the Philadelphia area has had one of the most remarkable improvements of any similar system in the world," Sharp says. "And that shows we need to be especially cautious of what happens next."
