For Release Sunday, May 20, 2012
© 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — Could it be serious — a major American city makes water conservation the linchpin of its 21st-century planning, the ticket to a future that’s both “green” and economically vibrant?
Answer: yes. And that grand old city is Philadelphia. Two centuries past the time it led America in population and power, a quarter-century past a wave of crippling industrial losses, Philadelphia is consciously making water conservation a centerpiece of its economic and environmental strategy — its goal to be the country’s “greenest” city.
Elements of the plan, first conceived in the city’s Office of Watersheds, sound radically less ambitious. The focus is on stopping storm water from flooding drainage systems and sending untreated sewage and debris flowing into local rivers and streams. (Yearly, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates, more than 10 trillion gallons of untreated urban runoff flow into the nation’s surface waters.)
To stem its discharges, Philadelphia is intent on filtering out, block by block, the fast, storm-induced runoff of pollutants — litter, oil, antifreeze, pesticides, bacteria from pet waste — that accumulate on concrete and asphalt surfaces, then wash into and pollute streams and rivers.
All this matters in dollars. Federal Clean Water Act rules could have obligated Philadelphia to spend as much as $10 billion for a system of massive tanks and tunnels to hold overflows — the “big engineering” solution many cities are following. By contrast, the cost of Philadelphia’s new water-conserving, storm-mitigating green infrastructure may be as little as $2 billion.
