In 2011, Philadelphia’s city-owned water utility drew national attention when it began Green City, Clean Waters, a 25-year program to manage an increasing volume of stormwater by using mostly “green infrastructure,” such as rain gardens and porous pavements, which allows rain to soak into the ground rather than becoming runoff that pollutes rivers and creeks.
In 2011, Philadelphia’s city-owned water utility drew national attention when it began Green City, Clean Waters, a 25-year program to manage an increasing volume of stormwater by using mostly “green infrastructure,” such as rain gardens and porous pavements, which allows rain to soak into the ground rather than becoming runoff that pollutes rivers and creeks.
With a plan for green infrastructure to drain some 9,500 acres across the city, the Philadelphia Water Department was considered by many to be at the cutting edge of stormwater management — an increasingly urgent challenge for city governments amid the bigger, more frequent rainstorms now occurring as a result of climate change, especially in the northeastern United States.
The program led Philadelphia and other U.S. cities to install nature-based solutions to absorb and filter rainfall alongside traditional “gray infrastructure,” such as pipes, tunnels, and pump stations. Yet while other cities, such as Milwaukee and Boston, saw green measures as complements to gray infrastructure, Philadelphia placed rain gardens and bioswales — vegetated ditches that collect stormwater — at the center of its strategy. But now, critics say, these innovations are proving inadequate at handling the increase in extreme rainfall events. In fact, the amount of overflow from pipes that combine stormwater with raw sewage has actually increased since the Green Cities program began.
Read more at: Yale Environment 360
Photo Credit: brigitsnow via Pixabay
