Philadelphia: One city’s likely scenario in the coming climate crisis.
When you type Philadelphia and Climate Change into your search engine, the first thing that comes up is a phila.gov (City of Philadelphia) link with the word sustainable. Click on that link and it ports you directly to the Philadelphia Water Department website and two key words stand out: warmer and wetter.30 Philadelphia is hot in the summer. Days in the 90s are the norm, sometimes coming as early as May and lasting well into September. Philadelphia averages about 3 inches of rain per month year round, but those storms often come in intense outbursts. With a city of impervious surfaces, stormwater runoff floods our sewer systems creating the dreaded combined sewer overflow. Combined sewer overflows dump untreated wastewater from homes mixed with water from the streets into our local waterways. With wetter weather, combined sewer overflows may increase, though Philadelphia does have an official mitigation plan for that.
Philadelphia relies on The Schuylkill River and the Delaware River for drinking water. Saltwater intrusion into the drinking water treatment plants is on the list of possibilities for troubles that the city could face. Rising sea level could mean that the salt water would travel further up the estuary than in the past, getting into the intakes for drinking water and making filtration difficult or impossible. Philadelphia has air quality issues as well, which impact city dwellers adversely. The city is rated as having one of the worst air quality ratings in the United States. The Asthma and Allergy Council ranked Philadelphia in the top 3 worst cities: nearly one in ten people suffer from asthma.31 Increasing temperatures cause increases in ground level ozone irritating the lungs of asthma sufferers. In urban environments such as Philadelphia, that translates to thousands of people who have asthma contending with increased risk.32 Keeping temperatures cooler could help reduce that risk.
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