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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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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This year, the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) celebrated 10 years of Green City, Clean Waters (GCCW), a 25-year plan that seeks to improve water quality in our creeks and rivers by using rain gardens, tree plantings and other green stormwater infrastructure to soak up stormwater. Sixty percent of our city is served by an old
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Tapeta Mayson, Philadelphia’s 2020-2021 poet laureate, knows that residents of Germantown can have mixed feelings about water. The area is susceptible to flooding during heavy rains and the loss and displacement that sometimes comes as a result. A native of Liberia who grew up in North Philly and Germantown, Mayson—in addition to being a poet—is
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