As cities grow, public utility leaders have to continually meet the challenges of keeping people healthy by removing unsanitary waste water from where we live.

Rethink “Out of sight, out of mind” because there is no such place as away. Water cycles around and around in the urban water use system.

Why do cities choose to create an underground infrastructure for wastewater?

What does our underground system look like?

Solicit from students what they know, or think they know, about the sewer system in Philadelphia. After gathering their ideas, the video linked below, and in the slide deck will take them on a tour of a sewer system.

Watch this video: Sewer Crawler Video

Have students note evidence of the sewer system in the school yard or around the school. If a walk around the schoolyard or neighborhood is not possible, have students note evidence on their way home from or to school.

This map shows where storm drains should be located. https://markingapp.philadelphiawater.org/map

Construct a Model

Students use a shoebox as a model for a row house. Adding water-using appliances lets them see how the infrastructure is needed to take water in and out of the house.

The Journey of Your Flush

Guiding Question:

How do the parts of the sewer infrastructure system interact with one another within the whole system?

Look at the image that details how wastewater is cleaned before returning to the river where it will be captured for drinking water. Refer back to the picture of the house. The sewer systems channels the wastewater into collection stations in step 1.

Flush Map

Sewer Photographs

Examine the Word “Systems”

Hypothesize: What happens if a part is missing or malfunctioning. How would that affect the functioning of the whole system?

How does the wastewater treatment process demonstrate a system?

Under the streets and houses of this city courses many a stream which once sparkled and babbled along through the forest years before the white man had placed foot on the soil of the new world. The limpid waters once visited by the deer and panther have lost their sweetness and their beds have changed from the mossy banks in the woodland to the slimy walls of the sewer.” Hidden Streams Philadelphia Times Article 1889.

How did engineering take us from “mossy banks in the woodland” to slimy walls of the sewer?

Examining Primary Sources

If your students want to examine more primary source documents and photographs, use the links in the slide deck to identify locations and how the underground sewer system has changed the topography.

Down Under Tales from the City Sewer System

Sewer Photographs