Now Is Not the Time To Go Swimming In The Schuylkill

Schuylkill has to be one of the weirdest words to spell.  Try spelling it without looking – I guarantee you won’t get it.  I always thought it was an Indian word but after reading somewhere on the internet, I learned that it’s actually Dutch, named by its Dutch discoverer.  Either way, it’s hard to spell, however, it is typically a good place for recreation.  But after major rain events like the storms we’ve had lately, you may want to be careful about dipping your toes in the SKOO-kel.  And yes, you can go swimming in the Schuylkill.  I’ve actually done it one time.  Despite the occasional dead body floating along beside you, the Schuylkill River can actually be a rather fun body of water.

My Uncle, who has spent his whole life living within the city limits of Philadelphia, used to call the Philadelphia tap water “Schuylkill Punch”.  That nickname didn’t always give me warm and fuzzies about drinking the Philly tap water.  However, I think the drinking water in Philadelphia is actually less of an issue than the quality of the river waters after major rain events.  This is because Philadelphia, like most older cities on the east coast, has a combined sewer system where stormwater and wastewater are both carried to the wastewater treatment facility in the same pipes.  This is all well and good, until the stormwater is extremely high and exceeds the capacity of the system.   In order to avoid sinks and toilets from backing up into people’s houses, the city has several combined sewer overflow points along the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers and some other smaller creeks.  The ideal would be if everyone started their own composting toilet, but that’s not going to be happening any time soon and probably never in the cities.

Yes, raw sewage pours into these rivers during large storm events.  And not only raw sewage, this water also contains plenty of chemicals and oils that are picked up from paved impervious surfaces.

According to Rivercast (www.phillyrivercast.org), conditions on the Schuylkill River are unsuitable for certain types of recreation over 30% of the time due to high bacteria levels.  It also creates conditions that are unsuitable for wildlife.

I suppose Philadelphia could embark on a plan to uproot the entire stormwater system and effectively separate the storm and waste water, but the chances of that happening are right up there with hell freezing over.  A less daunting solution may be to implement systems in the buildings and infrastructure of the city to reduce the amount of stormwater runoff.  Some of these strategies include the use of pavement that allows water to drain through to the soil below instead of rushing off to the stormwater system. The difficult part of constructing that would be with the potholing utilities but that that’s just a mere problem. Vegetated roofing also slows the runoff of stormwater.  Stormwater can also be diverted to more vegetated areas prior to being release into the system.

These and other stormwater mitigation techiques can be further reviewed at http://www.phillywatersheds.org/what_were_doing/green_infrastructure/programs.

But until we get about half of the houses in Philadelphia growing something on their roof, you better be careful about taking a dip in the Schuylkill.