A recent PennEnvironment report found that Pennsylvania school districts are failing to keep lead out of school drinking water. Grid spoke with the executive director of PennEnvironment, David Masur, to learn more. Why should people be concerned about lead in school drinking water? Lead is unsafe at any level, especially for kids. There’s no “safe”
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Floods are expensive. Homes and the possessions inside them are costly to repair and replace, plus displaced flood victims often have to pay to stay elsewhere while their home is made livable again. Here, we unpack the main tool for helping residents handle those costs: flood insurance. Know your flood risk Bounded by rivers and
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Camden In June 2021, Grid published a story on flooding in Camden’s Cramer Hill neighborhood, highlighting the disaster’s disparate impact on low-income communities of color. Since Grid last checked in, Franco Montalto, an engineering professor and researcher at Drexel University, and his team completed an advanced model that can simulate a variety of different infrastructure
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A while back, I learned that Grid contributor Carolyn Kousky is a national expert on flood insurance, a topic I knew little about. I asked her to write a primer for our readers who, if they’re anything like me, could stand to learn something. When I read through her first draft, I learned that FEMA
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For two decades, author Jeff Goodell has been working the climate beat for Rolling Stone magazine. He says it was while writing his first book about the coal industry and witnessing mountaintop removal mining that he understood the peril the planet is in. He’s given countless more readers that same dreadful understanding in his back-to-back
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Imagine walking on an abandoned pier in Philadelphia and entering a lush park surrounded by a mosaic of wetlands. An elegant heron jabs downward with its long, sharp beak, and you peer into the clear water to see what it’s after. Schools of fish swim over mussels amid waving green plants. This is the concept
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It doesn’t take 40 days and 40 nights of rain to flood your basement in Germantown, or — if you live in Manayunk on Venice Island — the first floor of your apartment building. In parts of Camden you might not need any rain at all, just a high tide on a full moon. Global
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What’s the size of a toaster and uses three times the energy of an average Pennsylvania household? That would be a cryptocurrency mining machine — a computer that runs 24/7 and spits out numbers in an attempt to solve complex problems, creating proof-of-work cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, as a result. “We have companies that have 80,000
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I used to have a neighbor across our alley who worked for the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD). He was a friendly, likable guy, but there was evidence, like his big SUV, that he wasn’t in lockstep with the street’s green-minded residents. He grew tomatoes and peppers on his deck, like many of us do, but
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Last summer, on a small beach along the Cooper River, seventeen-year-olds Star Beauchamps and Mickey Carter-Lopes waited to pull canoes into shore. This was their typical summer weekday: paddling, teaching and comparing the polka dot tan lines on their feet thanks to Crocs and hours spent working in the sun. The friends were two of
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Our Water Matters is an ongoing series produced through an editorial collaboration of the Chestnut Hill Local, Delaware Currents and Grid Magazine. Ever since the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) created a plan to fix its archaic sewer systems in 2011, proponents have held up the resulting program — Green City, Clean Waters — as a
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