{"id":483,"date":"2011-09-12T08:40:36","date_gmt":"2011-09-12T15:40:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.constructonomics.com\/blog\/?p=483"},"modified":"2019-09-30T23:18:19","modified_gmt":"2019-10-01T06:18:19","slug":"now-is-not-the-time-to-go-swimming-in-the-schuylkill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/2011\/09\/12\/now-is-not-the-time-to-go-swimming-in-the-schuylkill\/","title":{"rendered":"Now Is Not the Time To Go Swimming In The Schuylkill"},"content":{"rendered":"

Schuylkill has to be one of the weirdest words to spell.\u00a0 Try spelling it without looking – I guarantee you won’t get it.\u00a0 I always \"philly-skyline-with-the-schuylkill-river-t\"thought it was an Indian word but after reading somewhere on the internet, I\u00a0learned that it’s actually\u00a0Dutch, named by its\u00a0Dutch discoverer.\u00a0 Either way, it’s hard to spell, however, it is typically a good\u00a0place for recreation.\u00a0 But after major\u00a0rain events like the storms we’ve had lately,\u00a0you may want to be careful about dipping your toes in the\u00a0SKOO-kel.\u00a0 And yes, you can go swimming\u00a0in\u00a0the Schuylkill.\u00a0 I’ve actually done it one time.\u00a0 Despite the occasional dead body floating along beside you, the Schuylkill River can actually be a rather fun body of water.<\/p>\n

My Uncle,\u00a0who has\u00a0spent his whole life living within the city limits of\u00a0Philadelphia, used to call the\u00a0Philadelphia tap water “Schuylkill Punch”.\u00a0 That nickname\u00a0didn’t always give me warm and fuzzies about drinking the Philly tap water.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This is because Philadelphia,\u00a0like most older cities on the east coast, has a combined sewer system where stormwater and wastewater are\u00a0both carried to\u00a0the wastewater treatment\u00a0facility in the same pipes.\u00a0 This is all well and good, until the stormwater\u00a0is extremely high and exceeds the capacity of the system.\u00a0\u00a0 In order to avoid sinks and toilets from backing up into people’s houses, the city has several\u00a0combined sewer overflow points along the\u00a0Schuylkill and\u00a0Delaware\u00a0rivers and some other smaller creeks.\u00a0 The ideal would be if everyone started their own composting toilet<\/a>, but that’s not going to be happening any time soon and probably never in the cities.<\/p>\n

Yes, raw sewage pours into these rivers\u00a0during large storm events.\u00a0 And not only raw sewage, this water also contains plenty of chemicals and oils that are picked up from paved impervious\u00a0surfaces.<\/p>\n

According to Rivercast (www.phillyrivercast.org<\/a>), conditions on the Schuylkill River are unsuitable for certain types of recreation over 30% of the time due to high bacteria levels.\u00a0 It also creates conditions that are unsuitable for wildlife.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0A less daunting solution may be to implement systems in the buildings\u00a0and infrastructure of the city to\u00a0reduce the amount of stormwater runoff.\u00a0 Some of these strategies include the\u00a0use of pavement that allows\u00a0water to drain through to the soil\u00a0below instead of rushing off to the stormwater system. The difficult part of constructing that would be with the\u00a0potholing utilities<\/a>\u00a0but that that’s just a mere problem. Vegetated roofing also slows the runoff of\u00a0stormwater.\u00a0 Stormwater can also be diverted to more vegetated areas prior to being release into the system.<\/p>\n

These and other stormwater mitigation techiques can be further reviewed at http:\/\/www.phillywatersheds.org\/what_were_doing\/green_infrastructure\/programs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Schuylkill has to be one of the weirdest words to spell.\u00a0 Try spelling it without looking – I guarantee you won’t get it.\u00a0 I always thought it was an Indian word but after reading somewhere on the internet, I\u00a0learned that it’s actually\u00a0Dutch, named by its\u00a0Dutch discoverer.\u00a0 Either way, it’s hard to spell, however, it is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=483"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1833,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483\/revisions\/1833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}