After months of frequent rain that have left the ground saturated with moisture, this week’s storm is expected to result in runoff that fills sewers and raises river levels, and could flood roads and basements.
To help better manage that kind of high water event — and prepare for the more intense storms caused by climate change — the city is in the process of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to beef up its water and sewer systems.
Three big Philadelphia Water Department infrastructure projects just received a $25 million boost from the state as it parcels out federal funds from ARPA, the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill President Biden signed nearly three years ago.
The biggest of the grants is $15 million for construction of an effluent pump station at the Northeast Water Pollution Control Plant in Port Richmond. The new facility, which could end up costing a total of $100 million to build, will let the plant accept more sewerage and runoff and return clean water to the Delaware River more quickly.
One grant will go toward improving sewers in a flood-prone section of Germantown. Another is helping pay for upgrades at the Queen Lane Raw Water Pump Station in East Falls, in order to prevent an outage of the type that hit a different plant in 2021.
“We’re trying to insulate our infrastructure against climate change projections,” said Brian Rademaekers, a spokesperson for Philadelphia Water Department (PWD). The Queen Lane and Northeast projects “are looking at more extreme events along our rivers and protecting our infrastructure, making it work efficiently during those types of events.”
Modernizing an aging system
Flooding from Hurricane Ida in September 2021 turned the Vine Expressway into a river, damaged homes and starkly illustrated the problems facing the city’s aging water and sewer infrastructure.
Across the Schuylkill River from the Queen Lane station, the Belmont Raw Water Pump Station was flooded and pumping stopped for 11 days, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is helping fund the Queen Lane project. That threatened West Philadelphia’s drinking water supplies.
At the same time, the city also faces other water-related challenges.
As in many older communities, in much of Philadelphia stormwater and sewage flow through the same pipes to treatment plants. During heavy rainfall the system can overflow, spilling sewage into the rivers.
The city is halfway through a 25-year plan, called Green City, Clean Waters, to reduce spillage by using green infrastructure and expanding stormwater treatment capacity.
Another vulnerability got attention during last year’s hazardous spill scare in the Delaware River.
While chemicals that spilled from a facility in Bucks County never reached the city’s biggest water treatment plant, the incident reminded residents that in case of an emergency, the city can’t simply switch everyone’s water source to a different plant.
The recently funded projects won’t solve those problems, but they will help the Water Department help address them better, officials said.
Getting that flow out the door
At the 100-year-old Northeast Water Pollution Control Plant, one construction project is already underway. Equipment in a new preliminary treatment building will remove grit and trash from the sewage and runoff going into the plant, and allow an increase in processing capacity from 435 to 650 million gallons per day.
Currently, during storms the plant often can’t handle all the runoff and instead releases some of it — including raw sewage — into Tacony Creek. The project will reduce the need for those releases, said Samantha O’Connor, a civil engineer who oversees facilities projects at the Water Department.
The treatment building is budgeted at $100 million, with funding from a low-interest loan from the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Investment Authority’s PENNVEST program.
If that building is going to serve as a kind of bigger front door for the plant, the newly funded effluent pump station will be something like a bigger back door, pushing out higher volumes of cleaned water against opposing pressure from the Delaware River, O’Connor said.
“If you have a high flow event coupled with a high tide event, the plant is having trouble getting that out the door,” she said.
“This pumping project will greatly help that, not only for today’s flow that we’re seeing now, but for the future flows that are anticipated to increase,” she said.
The pump station could also end up costing $100 million, depending on the technology selected, officials said. It’s getting $15 million from ARPA via a state program called H2O PA, and the Water Department is applying for another grant from FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, Rademaekers said.
“We’re trying to go after any kind of source we can get to help fund these infrastructure investments,” he said. However, “most of our infrastructure investment is going to ultimately be paid for by water bills, by ratepayers.”
A small part of a big plan
On Queen Lane in East Falls, a pump station draws from the Schuylkill River and feeds a treatment plant, which makes the water safe to drink and sends it out to homes and businesses.
The Water Department plans to upgrade the pump station with two standby generators and other electrical equipment. They’ll be placed high enough that a major, once-in-500-years level flood won’t reach them, helping the station avoid a shutdown after a big storm like the Belmont facility experienced in 2021.
“It’s a proactive measure to prevent the risk of losing service at the raw water pump station,” said Jesse Debes, a PWD environmental engineer who works in drinking water facilities planning.
The work will cost $8.5 million to $10 million, he said, with $5.5 million coming from the ARPA grant.
Making the pump station resistant to shutdowns will help ensure there’s a backup water source for certain neighborhoods that might otherwise run dry during an emergency, such as a chemical spill or the aftermath of a flood, Debes said.
As such, the project is a small part of the department’s 25-year, $2.5 billion Water Revitalization Plan, which launched in 2019. The plan aims to allow PWD to serve the entire city with water from just the Schuylkill or Delaware indefinitely.
It includes hundreds of proposed projects, including upgrades to the Belmont and Queen Lane water treatment plants, a new pipe across the Schuylkill to connect the two plants, and transmission piping in North Philadelphia and Fox Chase. The department intends to start work on the connection pipe in 2026.
Drying out in G-town
Parts of Germantown are built over old creeks that still channel groundwater. The neighborhood also has an undulating topography that made it difficult for engineers to build sewers a century or more ago, according to PWD engineering supervisor Patrick Perhosky.
As a result, some low-lying areas have “residual flood risk” despite more projects to build modern sewer infrastructure.
“No matter if we put in a tunnel, a pump station, and storage tanks, there were certain areas that were unaffected by these backbone type projects,” Perhosky said.
One of them is an area along 21st Street between Stanton and Godfrey, where neighbors sometimes see water pooling on the ground and backing up in their basements. The fix is to put in bigger sewers, he said — six feet in diameter rather than the current four feet.
Since workers will already be digging up the street, the department is also taking the opportunity to put in new water mains. The total estimated cost is $8.6 million, and an ARPA-funded grant will cover close to half that amount.
Once the work is done, the department will focus on another flood-prone section of the neighborhood, and another, and another.
“It’s one project amongst many that we’ll be pursuing across the next 50 years in Germantown,” Perhosky said.
