If you were lucky enough to live on the 800 block of
Percy Street in South Philly, you could literally walk out your front door, pour the contents of a bottle of tap water onto the newly-paved street, and then watch as the water slowly began to be sucked up by the street itself, until it eventually disappeared altogether.
That's what happened, at any rate, during a recent press conference that was held on Percy Street's 800 block, which is now home to the city's very first porous street--a street that allows water to soak through its surface, in other words, thereby eliminating the pollutants found in storm water from entering the sewer system.
The street is one of the first initiatives of the
Water Department's 25-year-long, $2 billion
Green City, Clean Water program, which was itself the result of a directive from the
EPA, which insisted that the city fix its combined sewer overflow (
CSO) problem. CSO is an unfortunate situation during which sink and toilet water mixes with storm water in local rivers during periods of heavy rain.
According to the Water Department's Joanne Dahme, both the PWD and the
Streets Department will be monitoring the effect of Percy Street's porous surface street over the next few years. And as Dahme explains, storm water capture is only one of the benefits of such a surface.
"It seems to have a lot of positive qualities," Dahme says, of the porous surface. Ice is said to melt quicker, for instance, thanks to the warmth of the soil underneath, which also makes snow removal easier. And although the installation of the street was about 10 percent more expensive than it would have been with regular asphalt, the city is already hoping to install many more porous streets in the coming years.
Source: Joanne Dahme, Philadelphia Water Department
Writer: Dan Eldridge
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