Have you ever looked down into the depths of the Delaware River and thought, “It could be deeper”? The likely answer is no. Just last fall, however, The Port of Philadelphia released part of a 15-year plan to expand the port that includes dredging and deepening the Delaware River an additional five feet to a
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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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The Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership (TTF) has launched a master planning process for North Philadelphia’s Tacony Creek Park. The 300-acre park, one of Philadelphia’s five watershed parks, directly serves the Olney, Lawncrest, Feltonville, Juniata Park, and Frankford neighborhoods. The last master plan, dating back to 1997, focused on the park’s ecological assets. The current process will
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On April 20 local artist Meg Lemieur released an illustrated map of the Lenapewihittuk (Delaware River) watershed, complete with plants and wildlife found in the region. “I’ve been illustrating flora and fauna from the region for 15 years, and most of these animals are some of my favorites,” Lemieur says. Lemieur worked with cultural consultant
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The Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia held its sixth annual Excellence in Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) Awards on Thursday, April 21 at FringeArts and La Peg. Green stormwater infrastructure uses vegetation to soak up rain so that runoff doesn’t overwhelm combined stormwater/sewer systems such as Philadelphia’s, forcing sewage overflows into waterways. For more than
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The Schuylkill river, swollen with runoff from Hurricane Ida, was rising fast. Karen Young, the executive director of the Fairmount Water Works, knew it was only a matter of time until the river’s chocolate-brown water flooded the Interpretive Center, the water-focused museum next to the Fairmount Dam. “I was in the center the day the
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Recently my family tried out a new card game, Aqua Marooned! We are big fans of old classics like Uno, and we try out new games from time to time, usually when they end up in the gift pile on birthdays or holidays. Aqua Marooned! showed up at the Cobbs Creek Community Environmental Education Center,
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In colonial Jamaica a group of enslaved women were bathing in the nude, washing clothes and likely gossiping on a riverbank when some traveling Englishmen spied them, according to Kevin Dawson, associate professor of history at the University of California, Merced, in his book “Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora.” Thrilled with
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Recently I slid a few dozen times down the curvy slide at Henry C. Lea School, as demanded by my daughter Gilda, who slid on the adjacent straight slide. She is almost three years old and thus has a bottomless appetite for repetitive fun. Her older sister, Magnolia, is in the fourth grade at Lea.
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