A red-bellied turtle basking on a log next to a pocket of wetlands at Point Breeze on the Schuylkill River doesn’t know that it is threatened, legally speaking, or that its home is tiny compared to the once-expansive ecosystem that used to stretch far beyond its current territory. The controversy over a planned warehouse development
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The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education has announced that it is “indefinitely suspending its request for proposals to develop the Boy Scout Tract,” a 24-acre wooded parcel across Port Royal Avenue from the center’s core grounds in Upper Roxborough, according to an email sent on Tuesday, September 6, by the center’s executive director Mike Weilbacher.
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On a blisteringly hot day during Philadelphia’s mid-July heat wave, Bruno Rodrigo and Rafael Ibero leapt from the floating dock at Pleasant Hill Park in Northeast Philadelphia and into the refreshingly cool water of the Delaware River. Further into the channel people on jet skis zipped by, water spraying into the air in their wake.
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At its height, it reached three feet. The color of chocolate milk, the water flooded The Tricycle Shop’s first-floor retail and café space, submerging bistro tables and balance bikes, buoying trash cans and stacks of paper cups, lapping at the midsections of mannequins sporting branded jerseys. Hurricane Ida’s September 2021 rampage through the Philadelphia region
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Acloudy pool of water marks the spot where, every minute, about 1,200 gallons of toxic mine drainage, contaminated with sulfuric acid and iron, flows out of the ground in the hills above New Philadelphia, in Schuylkill County. Below lies a flooded mine void, the space where miners extracted tons of anthracite coal from the ground
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Traffic streams over the Adams Avenue Bridge in the video on the Tacony Creek Suite website. To the motorists, the creek and the park around it are simply something to cross, but the camera, as well as the music, focus on Tacony Creek Park, the corridor of flowing water and forest in the middle. “Each
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Like many American cities, Philadelphia is built on land that wants to be wet. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) Park sits in a particularly soggy corner, right at the junction where the Schuylkill River rushes into the Delaware. The park is perforated by several lakes and water channels, and flooding regularly renders pedestrian walkways impassible. Over
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Flooding is the reason for the FDR Park master plan. It also could be its undoing. No one denies that FDR Park has been growing soggier over the years. Paths that once led walkers around the “lakes” now run through marshy ground at the edge of the water. Stormwater flows off of I-95 and the
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Ted pickett counts himself lucky. He and his wife were home when the flooding started. As Hurricane Isaias dumped rain over the Delaware Valley and Darby Creek crested its banks on August 4, 2020, he and his wife got to work. “We were able to mitigate a real nasty thing,” Pickett says. For five hours
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Water flows from North Philadelphia’s Juniata Park neighborhood into Tacony Creek Park. It joins the wooded creek corridor to the rowhouse and asphalt streetscape above, but the connection can be hard to notice. This summer the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership — TTF for short — will work with partners to transform East Cayuga Street near the
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Water quality has been a hot topic in Philadelphia from the beginning. Early promotional materials for William Penn’s new city hyped the many streams that would carry away waste, and in the 1730s the likes of Benjamin Franklin tried to regulate industry to clean up the horribly polluted Dock Creek. (These efforts failed, and later
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