January 24, 2024
Michaela Althouse/PhillyVoice
Drinking water improvements, flood prevention and a cleaner Delaware River are on the docket with a $25 million federal grant. Funds will be put toward projects in Germantown, East Falls and Port Richmond (above).
Three years after Hurricane Ida turned the Vine Street Expressway into a river, Philadelphia received millions in federal funds for water system upgrades.
With the goals of improving drinking water, cleaning the Delaware River and limiting stormwater and flooding, the Philadelphia Water Department received $24.6 million for improvements to its water infrastructure. The money comes from the American Rescue Plan, the pandemic relief legislation signed by President Joe Biden in 2021.
In 2022, the average water main in Philadelphia was 76 years old, Pennsylvania House Rep. Jordan Harris, who serves District 186 in the city, said at a news conference Wednesday morning. The money will go toward three projects hoping to prevent flooding disasters.
"We know that Philadelphia is one of the oldest cities in the nation and because of that we have old and aging infrastructure, and that infrastructure must be addressed," Harris said.
The largest grant, $15 million, will go toward expanding Port Richmond's Northeast Water Pollution Control Plant. The goal is to increase the plant's processing capacity from 480 million gallons per day to 650 million gallons, allowing it to accept more sewage and runoff and return clean water back into the Delaware River more quickly.
Another $5.5 million goes to the Queen Lane Raw Water Pump Station in East Falls for outage prevention following a 2021 incident at the nearby Belmont Raw Water Pump Station. That station was offline for 11 days after Hurricane Ida flooding prevented it from pumping water, which threatened West Philly's drinking water.
Finally, $4.1 million will be put toward flood prevention in Germantown. The funds will expand and improve a half-mile of sewers in a flood-prone section of the neighborhood, preventing surface and basement floods.
"These (projects) are each affecting and touching a specific problem unique to its area of the water process," Randy Hayman, the water department's commissioner and CEO, told PhillyVoice.
At Wednesday's news conference, Mayor Cherelle Parker said her team has received messages from constituents about aging water infrastructure. She also said collaboration between city and state officials made a grant like this possible. Ahead of her inauguration, Parker created an intergovernmental roundtable for state, federal and city collaboration.
"We have to better coordinate and maximize the drawdown of federal and state funding for our infrastructure projects," Parker said.
