Me and My Watershed

The city of Philadelphia is part of the Delaware River Watershed. However, because there are many tributaries of the Delaware River and Schuylkill Rivers, there are several subwatersheds, or smaller watersheds within the larger Delaware River Watershed. Thus, Philadelphia includes several smaller watersheds: Poquessing, Pennypack, Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Wissahickon, Schuylkill, Darby-Cobbs, and Delaware Direct. After this lesson, students will be able to map the parameters of their local watershed and identify its characteristics. They will be using website applications such as Google Earth and Model My Watershed.

In the early settlement of Philadelphia, people relied on its abundant stream flowing downhill to also drain its wastewater off the streets, its privies and industrial factories. Once these streams became too polluted, the solution was to encapsulate them in a pipe system– a network of underground tunnels is our sewer system that we have to this day. Once created, the pipes were buried under new landfills that built up the landscape to be flat and buildable– row houses popped up everywhere and the built environment of Philadelphia that we see today came to be.

Natural surfaces, now covered with hard, impervious surfaces, were not only suitable for buildings, but for roads and transportation. With all of these changes, the land no longer had the natural ability to drain itself but now drained as part of an engineered infrastructure that manages the sanitary waste and stormwater in the city. This infrastructure functions at the smallest level of a single row home and spans the entire city connecting homes, schools, workplaces and shopping centers in a network of 3,000 miles of pipes underneath our streets to keep water flowing to our wastewater treatment plants, where it is cleaned and returned to the river.

Humans have drastically changed the landscape of Philadelphia over the last 300 or so years. Many creeks and streams once flowed over the land and into the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. Many of these waterways in the city have been covered over and used as sewers. These changes have shaped the way people interact with the local waterways and environment and have resulted in intended and unintended consequences that we will explore in the Unit. In the end, students will envision a future that is sustainable for all living things and helps us thrive over time.