Grid Magazine September 2024 [#184]

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Fixing the laws so you can fix your stuff

Weavers Way gets a solar array through a fellow co-op

What you need to know about flood insurance

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THE RISING WATERS ISSUE

Is it

TIME TO MOVE? With sea level rise and more intense rainfall, flood-prone Philadelphia must adapt

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EDI TO R ’S NOTES

by bernard brown

publisher Alex Mulcahy managing editor Bernard Brown associate editor & distribution Timothy Mulcahy tim@gridphilly.com deputy editor Katherine Rapin art director Michael Wohlberg writers Kyle Bagenstose Allison Beck Bernard Brown Jessie Buckner Carolyn Kousky Alex Mulcahy Jenny Roberts Bryan Satalino Ben Seal photographers Chris Baker Evens Jared Gruenwald Solmaira Valerio illustrators Chanelle Nibbelink Bryan Satalino published by Red Flag Media 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor Philadelphia, PA 19107 215.625.9850 G R I D P H I L LY. C O M

Content with the above logo is part of Every Every Voice, Every Vote, a collaborative project managed by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Lead support for Every Voice, Every Vote in 2024 and 2025 is provided by the William Penn Foundation with additional funding from The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, Comcast NBC Universal, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Henry L. Kimelman Family Foundation, Judy and Peter Leone, Arctos Foundation, Wyncote Foundation, 25th Century Foundation, and Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation.

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GR ID P H IL LY.CO M

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Dead Serious

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while back, I learned that Grid contributor Carolyn Kousky is a national expert on flood insurance, a topic I knew little about. I asked her to write a primer for our readers who, if they’re any­ thing like me, could stand to learn some­ thing. When I read through her first draft, I learned that FEMA has a Community Rating System for flood insurance, and fed�­ eral flood insurance policyholders can get discounts of up to 45% on their premiums if their communities take flood mitigation steps such as preserving open space and avoiding building in floodplains. I also learned that our City government has not yet chosen to participate in the program.

According to an official quoted in a WHYY article on the topic, Philadelphia could probably secure a 10 to 20% discount for residents based on existing practices and policies. They would likely need an ex­ tra staff person to spearhead the initiative, but it wouldn’t require any new measures.

This would save policyholders a chunk of change and perhaps lower the cost of premi­ ums enough to make insurance affordable for more people.

Qualifying for the 20 to 45% discount would require much more dramatic actions, such as buying out flood-prone properties and limiting development in floodplains.

These common-sense measures, unfortu­ nately, have little chance of happening in Philadelphia’s development-first culture.

If you’re new to Philly politics you might scratch your head and think that prevent­ ing construction where flooding is likely is a no-brainer. The same goes for not building in a floodplain, which, as Kyle Bagenstose explains in this issue, is bound to make flooding worse elsewhere. Preserving open space that soaks up precipitation and, close to the water, could buffer the impact of storm surges and swollen rivers also seems

like a clear winner. All of these solutions could save the lives and property of Phila­ delphians, which is why FEMA encourages them. But powerful lobbies in Philadelphia — developers and the Philadelphia Building Trades — have other priorities.

Take a look at Venice Island, which sits in the Schuylkill River on the other side of the Manayunk Canal. It was an oft-flooded industrial area until about 20 years ago, when developers and City Councilmembers (including future-Mayor Michael Nutter) lobbied to reclassify the island from a flood­ way, where you cannot build, to a flood­ plain, where you can, and then rezoned it to allow apartments and row houses. In the process, they fought a lawsuit brought by neighbors opposing the development all the way to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

Those neighbors lost the suit but have been proven right in the worst way as floods have repeatedly required residents to be rescued from their windows by swift-water rescue teams. It is too easy to imagine a future flood when the boats don’t get there in time.

As one swift-water rescue expert put it back when developing Venice Island was still only a terrible idea: “Sooner or later someone is going to die down there.”

I’m not sure when our elected officials will stop allowing dangerous development, but for now we can start by educating our­ selves. Check your current flood risk and buy the insurance you need. Next time you move, avoid high-risk properties. And con­ tact your elected officials now to urge them to enact smart flood management, even if it means saying no to development.

b e r na r d b r ow n , Managing Editor

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reuse and reduce

Fixing electronics would be easier for independent shops like Phone Repair Philly if manufacturers had to share proprietary information.

Make It Right Corporations don’t want us fixing our own stuff. Advocates and politicians are working to change that by jenny roberts

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hen west philadelphia mechanic Wayne Fleishman has to repair a computer-related issue on a vehicle, he often finds himself reaching out to the manufacturer for more information. After all, newer models have more than a dozen computer systems helping control everything from the tires to the lane departure warning.

Dealerships sell repair information digitally to independent mechanics like Fleishman at a cost ranging from $250 to $2,000 — an expense that’s passed on to the customer. This information is only available to the buyer for a certain amount of time, 4 GR ID P H IL LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 2024

which is associated with the cost.

That becomes a problem when the information isn’t accurate.

“Sometimes the information isn’t correct, and the dealer doesn’t want to give it to us for free a second time, even though it’s their fault,” says Fleishman, owner of Wayne’s Garage.

Independent mechanics like Fleishman face many barriers to getting the repair information they need, says Lisa Foshee, senior vice president of government affairs and the general counsel for the Auto Care Association, an advocacy organization representing the entire supply chain of the automotive aftermarket.

In some cases, there are special repair manuals that cost more and take longer to get, she says. Other times, manufacturers use firewalls and secure gateways that block independent mechanics from getting any information from the vehicle to diagnose a problem.

That’s why the Auto Care Association has been advocating for state and federal right-to-repair legislation.

“What we are asking is that the aftermarket and the owners of the vehicles be given the same data in the same time frame at the same cost that the dealers get it,” Foshee says.

There’s already such right-to-repair laws on the books in Maine and Massachusetts. At the federal level, the association is supporting the Right to Equitable and Professional Auto Industry Repair (REPAIR) Act, proposed bipartisan legislation that was introduced to the House of Representatives in 2023.

The push for right-to-repair laws first P HOTO BY SO L M AIRA VA LERI O

This will undoubtedly extend the useful life of our devices, sending fewer of them to the landfills and putting less demand on the raw products needed to produce them in the first place.”

— kyle mullins, State Representative, Lackawanna County sprang up around the automotive aftermarket more than a decade ago. But efforts have since been waged to pass state and federal legislation requiring manufacturers of all kinds of products to provide the tools, parts and information necessary for repairs.

“Right now, those are things that you cannot get for many, many products,” says Nathan Proctor, senior director of the rightto-repair campaign for PIRG, a federation of state-based Public Interest Research Groups.

There’s proposed right-to-repair legislation across 30 states to change that — including in six states that have already passed laws, according to PIRG’s tracker.

These laws cover products such as cell phones, computers, household appliances, copy machines, routers and firewalls.

Mac Frederick, owner of Phone Repair Philly, says right-to-repair legislation would make his work easier. “I think more customers would trust going to a third-party repair shop or a small business and saving time and money,” he says.

Frederick says serialized hardware on iPhones that communicate with the phone’s software can make it difficult for thirdparty repair shops like his to fix the phones with parts from resellers. Sometimes customers get a notice in the settings about the mismatch and other times the parts won’t work at all.

“It just causes confusion and an inconvenience for the consumer,” he says.

Apple and other large companies have historically been against right-to-repair laws, but in 2022, Apple supported rightto-repair legislation in California, according to reporting by CNBC. And in 2023, Apple supported the idea of nationwide legislation, so long as it provides uniform regulations for data security and product integrity, according to the same report.

Proctor says companies have an incentive

to compete to make more money, and legal protections are essential to create an even playing field, especially with the speed with which digital technology changes.

Legislators and advocates agree rightto-repair legislation, once passed, would ultimately make the economy more fair for consumers. It would also benefit the environment, they say.

Foshee says there’s an environmental argument to be made for automotive right-torepair laws: Like other consumer products, it’s better to repair cars than put them in landfills. And the longer owners can keep their cars on the road, the less waste there will be.

Proctor highlights the energy-intensive manufacturing process for smartphones: The amount of energy it takes to charge a smartphone is only a tiny fraction of how much energy it took to produce it, he says.

“For every cell phone that we produce, we have to mine and smelt and manufacture and ship these products.”

If Americans kept their cell phones one year longer on average, the emissions reduction would be the same as taking 636,000 cars off the road, Proctor says, citing PIRG’s 2020 report “The Fix Is In.” It doesn’t help that, once electronics have reached their natural end, the majority of e-waste isn’t recycled. In 2022, the world generated 62 million metric tons of e-waste, according to the most recent United Nations report. Only 22.3% of that waste was recycled properly.

“This will undoubtedly extend the useful life of our devices, sending fewer of them to the landfills and putting less demand on the raw products needed to produce them in the first place,” says State Rep. Kyle Mullins, D-Lackawanna County, who plans to introduce a right-to-repair bill in September.

Mullins says that for now his bill will exclude coverage for farming and medical

equipment to protect consumer safety, a decision informed by a March 2024 hearing in the State House Commerce Committee.

“There’s certainly some products out there, some equipment that would not be appropriate for you to repair or tweak yourself, or go to some technician not fully trained or perhaps cleared to work on that very device,” he says.

Proctor, on the other hand, doesn’t believe any products should be excluded from right-to-repair legislation; exemptions, he says, are the result of successful lobbying.

“The companies that make those products fight really hard,” he says.

There may be specialized products that require separate policy solutions, Proctor adds, but “at the end of the day, monopolized repair is bad.”

Mullins’ bill won’t be the first right-torepair proposal in the state legislature. In 2023, State Sen. Mike Regan, R-Cumberland/York, introduced S.B. 744, a right-torepair bill that would provide coverage for digital electronic equipment. If passed, the bill would require manufacturers to provide product owners and independent repair providers with “documentation, parts and tools used to diagnose, maintain and repair digital electronic equipment.” The bill excludes cars, medical devices and outdoor power, farming, yard and construction equipment.

“It comes down to protecting consumers from restrictions imposed by manufacturers of electronics — products that are an everyday need in our lives. Not to mention, having the right to repair extends the life of these products and reduces the amount of e-waste,” Regan says in a statement.

“For me, the right to repair means having actual ownership of these devices.”

With Mullins’ forthcoming bill, Regan says he’s hopeful the House and Senate will be able to accomplish final passage of right-to-repair legislation by the end of this year’s session.

Proctor says right-to-repair legislation is a prime opportunity for bipartisanship, and Pennsylvania would be the perfect place to display that with its divided legislature.

“We think everybody needs to fix their stuff,” Proctor says. “It’s really about product owners against product manufacturers, not any other kind of political fight.” ◆ S E PTE M B E R 20 24 G R I DP HILLY.COM 5

energy

“Collectively We Can” The Clean Energy Co-op is making solar affordable for organizations in Pennsylvania by allison beck

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hen weavers way co-op started building their new store in Germantown, they realized its roof was the perfect site for a solar array. Members had long hoped to power their operations with clean energy. There was only one problem: There was little chance the co-op would be able to pay upfront for installation.

“We’re consuming a lot of electricity and so we are always looking for more sustainable alternatives,” says Weavers Way general manager Jon Roesser. “The tricky part is we also have to be mindful of our operating costs.”

In Pennsylvania, it takes a while for businesses’ solar installations to pay off. Conventional electricity in the state is cheaper and fewer solar incentives exist than in surrounding states, especially for larger buildings.

The Clean Energy Co-op (CEC) is working to change that by making solar array

installations affordable for small businesses and nonprofits, including Weavers Way Germantown, which had a 140-panel array installed in August.

The CEC was founded in 2014 out of the Sustainable Energy Education and Development Support (SEEDS) organization in Honesdale, Wayne County. Using the coop model where members pay a fee and can opt in for additional investments, they have been able to install solar arrays on locations across eastern Pennsylvania. Its six previous projects include organic farms, a church and a local theater.

CEC customers have two options for financing their solar arrays: a low interest loan or a power purchase agreement, both of which are set to reflect what a standard electric company would charge.

Customers generally don’t have to come up with

Weavers Way general manager Jon Roesser says that the mission of the Clean Energy Co-op jibes perfectly with the food co-op he leads.

6 GRID P H IL LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 2024

any of the capital costs — they’re only responsible for purchasing the electricity.

“They just have to pay their electric bill,” says Marion Biddle, a member of both coops who played a large role in starting the project at Weavers Way. “And they’d have to do that anyway.”

The CEC, which has about 170 members, funds projects through a combination of general shares ($100 for a lifetime membership) and $1,000-increment preferred shares, which are offered when a new project begins. When a project starts paying back, those shares can then be used to finance new projects.

The CEC also keeps their overhead low by relying on volunteer work in addition to members’ investment.

“What I want to do is really try to empower people, that we can actually make a change,” says Joy Baxter, the founder of the CEC’s Havertown chapter. “It’s people, community, environment and then profit. This is socially conscious investing.”

A critical part of both CEC and Weavers Way’s missions is keeping profits tied to community members.

“It’s what gets me up in the morning,” Roesser says.

“The people that are actually earning the profit from the investment are small local investors as opposed to a big energy corporation.”

The co-ops selected Olde Kensington-based Solar States, which installed the array in mid-August.

“We’re just doing a different model than what people normally think of as the regular business model,” Baxter says. “People want to be connected to other people, to do things together, and I think it’s just amazing. I don’t think any one of the people in the Clean Energy Co-op could themselves finance one of these solar installations, but collectively we can.” ◆ P HOTO BY SO L M AIRA VA LERI O

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Is it time to move?

It doesn’t take 40 days and 40 nights of rain to flood your basement in Germantown, or — if you live in Manayunk on Venice Island — the first floor of your apartment building. In parts of Camden you might not need any rain at all, just a high tide on a full moon.

Global warming is global ice melting, of course, and our seas are rising, pushing more water up our tidal waterways. Warmer air holds more water to dump on the land. Heavy rains can come with or without a tropical storm.

the

RISING WATERS issue

In this issue we take a look at the wet side of global warming. We look at where the waters have risen and what has happened there since. We consider resilience as well as retreat.

There are plenty of steps we can take as individuals. We can buy flood insurance. We can research the flood risk and history of properties before we move in. But floods are big, community-wide events; there is only so much we can do as individuals. It takes the government — from City Hall to Capitol Hill — to get moving too.

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the RISING WATERS i s su e

THE INEVITABLE RETREAT grid talks with journalist and author Jeff Goodell (again) — this time about about the rising waters that will reshape the world

F

INTERVIEW BY ALEX MULCAHY

or two decades, author Jeff Goodell has been working the climate beat for Rolling Stone magazine. He says it was while writing his first book about the coal industry and witnessing mountaintop removal mining that he understood the peril the planet is in. He’s given countless more readers that same dreadful understanding in his back-toback indispensable books, “The Heat Will Kill You First” (2023) and “The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World” (2017).

Grid caught up with Goodell to discuss “The Water Will Come,” strategies for adaptation, the need for retreat and the indisputable reality of a changing planet.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

and really think about what the consequences of flooding and sea level rise to a place like Miami would be.

You have been referred to as a “climate Cassandra,” the priestess in Greek mythology who made prophecies which were true but never believed. And you have predicted the downfall of Miami. The first day I arrived in Miami was during sunny day flooding, which is a particularly high tide that happens a few times a year, and I went to a neighborhood called Sunset Harbor, which is a relatively wealthy neighborhood in Miami Beach. I was walking through the streets in like two and a half, three feet of water. I mean, it was not like it required a lot of detective work to figure out the risks that Miami faces. It’s just that nobody had cared to really project that into the future

In the book you document your trips around the world to look at the massive projects some cities like Venice, with their “Ferrari on the Seafloor,” are taking to try to adapt.

What are some of the problems with the adaptations? If you could say, “We’re going to need to defend this city from two feet of sea level rise in the next hundred years,” that would be very straightforward. You would know how high a wall to build. It’s very different when you say, “Well, we need to protect this city from maybe it’ll be one foot and maybe it’ll be six feet, and maybe it’ll be in 25 years and maybe it’ll be in 45 years.” When you’re building a wall, a giant fortification, like the one you mentioned in

10 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 2024

You titled your 2013 story for Rolling Stone “Goodbye, Miami.” The reason I called my original story “Goodbye, Miami” is that there is no scenario in which the Miami that we know today survives. In another three or four decades — the lifetime of kids growing up there now — it will be either gone or in a very different place. And the reason I called my book “The Water Will Come” is because this is not a maybe scenario. This is not a hypothetical, this is not a model.

This is just a straight fact of physics that we all know. When it gets hot, ice melts, and when ice melts, the water rises, and that’s what’s happening.

Venice, it’s very hard to kind of re-engineer those kinds of things for higher sea level.

The future is so uncertain, the question is, are you buying 30 years, 50 years? And that’s the kind of uncertainty that we are unaccustomed to dealing with.

And this idea that we’re just going to build a lot of sea walls is very naïve thinking. You know, ultimately what’s going to happen is that we’re going to have to retreat.

Speaking of retreat, I’m pretty obsessed with firststreet.org, which gives real es� tate scores based on various climate risks.

Do you think climate change’s impact on property values will motivate more Americans to take direct action? Yeah, I certainly think that’s one major driver for change. I don’t think it’s the only one, but I think it’s a really important one. You know, my mom has a house in fire country in Northern California and she’s going to sell it not only because of the rising insurance costs but just the risks of living in a place that you know could burn down. Every summer she’s on edge about whether she’s going to have to get her go bag and jump in her car and drive off in the middle of the night. So there’s a lot of motivations for change. And I think what First Street is doing is really good because the idea of being able to look at your property, your place where you live, and better understand what those risks are is a really important tool in making better decisions about where you live.

I think one of the big questions when we think about the future that is coming in coastal areas as a result of rising seas is, what kind of retreat are we going to have?

Is it just going to be kind of what I call in my books, this sort of “Mad Max” retreat where everybody just is like in every man for themselves, or is there going to be some kind of strategic planning about how we’re actually going to encourage people to move to higher ground and encourage people to stop building in low-lying areas?

Even though climate change will affect everyone, you make the case that the economically disadvantaged are more immediately vulnerable. All of this storm protection and building changes are happening

da and in many coastal cities, making a bigger disparity between the wealthy and the poor, increasing the sense that these protections are mostly for people who can afford them and who the political system caters to.

This is not a hypothetical, this is not a model.

This is just a straight fact of physics that we all know.

When it gets hot, ice melts, and when ice melts, the water rises, and that’s what’s happening.”

K E N N Y B R AU N

JEFF GOODELL in the wealthiest neighborhoods. They are getting the most protection. Then the real low-lying places like Homestead, south of Miami Beach, where there’s a working class and middle class, are getting essentially no attention. And those places are going to be

the first to be flooded out. Those are the people who are going to be the first to lose their homes. Those are the ones who are impacted already right now by rising prices for flood insurance.

That’s driving up the cost of living in Flori-

Your recent books and Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction” are profoundly sad books to read. How do you process all of this? You don’t seem like a morose fellow.

It is hard psychologically thinking about this, but I’ll say two things. One is that the upside of it is that I meet a lot of amazing people who are deeply engaged in thinking about this. I meet entrepreneurs who are doing amazing things, thinking about new kinds of solar energy or new transmission grids or whatever. I meet activists who are fighting really hard to highlight this, to bring more political awareness in our world to things like this.

There’s a lot of inspiring stuff that’s happening.

But the loss is hard to handle.

You brought up the decline of biodiversity in Betsy Kolbert’s book.

And I think that’s one of the hardest things to deal with. I went a month ago to see whooping cranes on the Texas coast, and there’s only like 400 whooping cranes left in the world and they’ve made something of a recovery. There used to be only I think 14, about 15 years ago, but their nesting ground is in the kind of bayou right outside these chemical and refinery plants and they’re doomed.

I’m not sure who said it, that a hanging clarifies the mind. Knowing that Miami Beach will not be there in the not-sodistant future, that it’s a doomed place and seeing the whooping cranes and knowing that they’re really doomed, this transience of everything makes me see things in a more vivid way. And in a way, it’s made my life more alive because you are forced to look at the world with a kind of immediacy and a kind of understanding of the sort of miraculousness of this moment. And this moment will pass. ◆ S E PTE M B E R 20 24 G R I DP HILLY.COM 1 1

the RISING WATERS i s su e

GET OUT Home buyout programs adapt to worsening flood risks

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BY BEN SEAL

hen Tropical Storm Isaias hit the East Coast in early August 2020, the waters of Perkiomen Creek surged higher than 19 feet, a record for the waterway and eight feet beyond its flood stage.

Homes situated along the creek on First Avenue in Collegeville, Montgomery County, bore the brunt of the flooding. But the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) didn’t offer the borough support with buyouts, so most opted not to move.

A year later, many Collegeville residents were just finishing the arduous task of cleaning up and putting their homes and lives back together when Hurricane Ida (by then a post-tropical cyclone) brought even more extreme rainfall to the region. It was estimated that the creek’s floodwaters crested at more than 26 feet — an estimate because the U.S. Geological Survey’s gauge maxes out at 20. This time, the response to the devastation was different.

By November 2021, two months after the floods, members of Collegeville’s municipal government met with homeowners — many of whom had been flooded several times in the preceding two decades — to offer a better solution.

“Living with that anxiety and fear every time they call for a big storm, that you’re going to lose your belongings or home or have to be rescued, is stressful,” Collegeville borough manager Tamara Twardowski says.

“We thought the most prudent thing to do was to try to buy the properties out.”

Of the 22 homeowners who endured substantial damage by Ida, 20 agreed to sell their properties to the borough, which bought them with $6 million in FEMA funding.

After two months of demolition this spring, the long and winding process of flood buyouts reached its conclusion in Collegeville. Now, where homes once faced 12 GR ID P H IL LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 2024

the threat of damage and destruction with each major rainfall, the stretch of land along the creek has been returned to open space, where plant life will flourish and serve as a buffer in the event of future floods. And future floods are sure to come.

More than 1,500 Pennsylvania homes were acquired and demolished using FEMA funds between 1994 and 2021, according to a review of the agency’s data. Of those, 27 were in Bucks County, 18 in Chester County, 60 in Delaware County and 159 in Montgomery County. Philadelphia, meanwhile, bought out two duplexes following Hurricane Floyd in 1999, according to Elaine Montes, the City’s program manager for flood resilience; the City has not conducted any buyouts since then.

As climate change contributes to rising sea levels and more extreme weather events, flood risk managers recognize property buyouts as an increasingly important tool to protect their communities — and the only mitigation strategy that completely eliminates a household’s flood risk.

“To give people money to rebuild or give assistance to flood victims whose homes continue to flood every year seems like throwing money away,” Twardowski says.

“The most effective measure is to buy the property and let people go elsewhere.”

Not If, but When There are four strategies to address flood risk, says A.R. Siders, director of the University of Delaware’s Climate Change Science and Policy Hub: resist (holding back water with floodwalls and levees); accommodate (elevating homes, for example); avoid (preventing new buildings being placed in floodplains); and retreat (relocating residents to safer homes). Buyouts represent the last of these and are the primary mechanism through which the United

States deals with repetitive flood loss. Since 1989, FEMA has funded the acquisition of around 45,000 homes, pouring $4 billion into the program — accounting for the vast majority of the agency’s support for floodprone properties.

In the case of a buyout, which requires a municipality to sponsor an application, a flood-prone home is purchased at a preflood valuation. Given the neighborhood scale of most floods, the median buyout includes 11 homes being addressed at once, Siders says. She’s in favor of scaling up relocation efforts, noting that it isn’t a question of if people in floodplains are going to have

Collegeville borough manager Tamara Twardowski says buying out flood-prone properties saves money and reduces anxiety.

To give people money to rebuild or give assistance to flood victims whose homes continue to flood every year seems like throwing money away. The most effective measure is to buy the property and let people go elsewhere.”

TA M A R A T WA R D OWS K I , Collegeville borough manager to move, but when.

“Insurance prices are rising, floods are getting worse, people want out and they don’t want to just sell and put a new family in the house in the same situation,” Siders says. “Making buyouts available is a really P HOTO BY C H R IS BA K ER EV E N S

important part of giving people meaningful choices.”

The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) is working on 282 buyouts, primarily in the southeastern part

of the state, thanks to nearly $120 million in combined funding from Ida and COVID-19 relief efforts, according to PEMA hazard mitigation officer Tom Hughes. It’s the most funding the agency has ever had for its mitigation programs, he says, and considering how often he and his colleagues hear about unusual flooding — either in terms of location or severity — demand will only continue to grow.

In Philadelphia, where Eastwick residents live in fear of Cobbs Creek overflowing with each heavy rainfall and Manayunk homes and businesses are at the mercy of the Schuylkill River, buyouts are part of the S E PTE M B E R 20 24 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 13

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An Imperfect Solution Even successful buyout programs have flaws, Siders says. Among them is the often insufficient money offered to relocating homeowners, whose home values are often depressed by virtue of being in a floodplain.

The process also takes as long as five years; even the fastest buyouts take at least three to six months, Siders says. After a disaster occurs, a community must await a disaster declaration, then document the damage, compile paperwork at the state and federal levels, wait for their municipality to secure funding, then conduct appraisals and negotiations.

“It’s really difficult for residents waiting in limbo to decide whether to repair the home that was flooded and damaged,” Siders says. “Making that process faster is a really important issue.”

In Collegeville, half of the families affected by Ida never returned to their homes, which were rendered unlivable. Several rehabilitated their second floors enough to stay in place while the buyout process unfolded. One couple slept in a tent on their property for a period of time. Most waited at least 18 months before settlement, Twardowski says.

14 GRID P H I L LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 20 24

Perkiomen Creek jumped its banks after the remnants of Hurricane Ida hit Southeastern Pennsylvania in September 2021.

“It was a very upsetting time,” she says.

“If they had mortgages, they still had to pay them or they would lose the house.”

Beyond all of the bureaucratic red tape that accompanies the buyout process, there are also social concerns that deserve attention, says Kevin Loughran, assistant professor of sociology at Temple University, who studies urban adaptation and environmental justice.

Given that FEMA buyouts are entirely voluntary, many homeowners opt to stay in place and deal with continued flood risks.

“It’s an economic and engineering question when you’re talking about taking people’s property, taking them out of their communities,” Loughran says. “But a lot of people value being able to stay close to where they live, even in the midst of flooding.”

Offering a Lifeline Across the Delware River, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s Blue Acres program offers a window into one possible future for flood buyouts. Since 1995, the program has used state and federal funding to buy out more than 1,100 homes, according to program manager Courtney Wald-Wittkop. Residents who apply for the program are assigned a case manager “to hold a homeowner’s hand throughout the process,” she says, supporting the equally complex financial and emotional aspects of a buyout. The majority of the program’s buyouts have come since 2012, when Hurricane Sandy destroyed thou-

sands of homes. As flooding becomes more extreme, Wald-Wittkop says Blue Acres is looking to adapt.

“A large portion of our work has been responsive, but we know problems are getting worse,” she says. “How do we do it in a smarter, more strategic way? It requires not just looking at which homes are in the floodway but where we’re seeing people who’ve flooded out a couple times even in just the past year.”

Blue Acres is made effective by its consistent source of funding from both state and federal government, which means it doesn’t have to wait for a disaster to pursue buyouts, Siders says. It also has negotiating power with banks, sometimes securing lower mortgage rates to facilitate the purchase of a new home and motivate relocation, she says, as well as tighter timelines than other buyout programs. Notably, the program’s dedicated staff eliminates an obstacle faced in many communities: the reliance on overwhelmed local administrators to lead the process.

As flood risk mitigation becomes a pressing concern in Philadelphia and beyond, more effective and proactive buyout programs could be the key to keeping communities out of harm’s way, offering a solution to the fear and anxiety of life in a floodplain.

“These are options. These are tools,” Wald-Wittkop says. “We’re not — at least right now — saying to people, ‘You must go.’

We’re offering you a lifeline. We’re giving you a choice to get out of this situation.” ◆

C O L L E G E V I L L E F I R E C O M PA N Y

conversation but not yet being carried out.

Housing stock is in part to blame, Montes says. Some 60% of the city’s houses are row houses, which complicates any thought of a buyout because of the challenges posed to neighbors’ structural integrity if a home is demolished.

Housing supply is another issue. As Hughes points out, homeowners in the rest of the state can more easily find a new home to move into. In Southeastern Pennsylvania, though, it’s not so simple. “In Philadelphia,” Montes says, “where do we put all the people?”

So while the surrounding counties have managed to buy out the homes at greatest risk of repeated flood damage — and neighboring New Jersey boasts one of the country’s foremost buyout programs — Philadelphia is still developing its plans to integrate buyouts into the broader suite of mitigation strategies.

“It’s not that we don’t have a buyout program in Philly because we don’t want to,” Montes says. “It’s because the tools and technical and financial support and availability are big roadblocks we’re grappling with.”

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“A CRISIS OF IMAGINATION” Urban wetlands are an invaluable piece of climate resilience.

Their restoration is scuttled by impossibly difficult regulatory hurdles

BY JESSIE BUCKNER

I

magine walking on an abandoned pier in Philadelphia and entering a lush park surrounded by a mosaic of wetlands. An elegant heron jabs downward with its long, sharp beak, and you peer into the clear water to see what it’s after. Schools of fish swim over mussels amid waving green plants.

This is the concept my team of ecologists, landscape architects, architects, engineers and land managers organized by the nonprofit Delaware River Waterfront Corporation (DRWC) and led by Olin Studio presented to regulators in 2020: converting stretches of abandoned piers and surrounding waters into resilient refuges for both humans and wildlife that would improve water quality and mitigate flooding. It was a culmination of studies by the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) and a 2011 Master Plan for the Central Delaware involving the input of many.

We were immediately shot down.

Regulators cited uncertainty around the environmental benefits and said that our inclusion of hard structures like breakwaters, which reduce the force of waves, would disturb the existing mudflats. So we took this feedback, collected more data, refined our designs and repeated the process iteratively. Despite our efforts, four years later the project is still not permitted.

Our continued challenges and delays bring to light the barriers to restoring wetlands and shorelines in Philadelphia — and they’ve initiated a long and loud conversation to find solutions.

Why should we care about having wetlands in our city? A functional wetland can provide myriad benefits, referred to in ecology as “ecosystem services,” including flood regulation, water filtration, biodiversity support, carbon sequestration and recreation.

Philadelphia contains 25 miles of tidal shore16 GRID P H IL LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 20 24

This page: Grid contributor Jessie Buckner stands in the shallows of the Delaware River, where a wetland could thrive. Opposite: Buckner joins Lance Butler (at the helm) and other researchers to study the creatures of the Delaware, including this freshwater mussel.

line along the Delaware River and eight along the Schuylkill, plus 118 miles of aboveground creeks. Since the city’s rivers are close enough to the Atlantic Ocean to be influenced by its tides yet far enough away that their waters

are fresh, Philadelphia is home to a rare and important habitat type: freshwater tidal wetlands. They provide significantly more diversity than salty or brackish wetlands, which are far more common.

P HOTO BY JARE D G RUENWA LD

The greatest challenges to restoring and creating tidal wetlands in Philadelphia are ecological and regulatory.”

R A N DY B R OW N ,

T E D M U L L E N , R E S O U R C E E N V I R O N M E N TA L S O LU T I O N S

Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection

Historic maps indicate that much of Philadelphia, especially South Philadelphia, was covered by tidal wetlands, wet meadows and mudflats. Very little of these remain. Local experts believe that the Delaware Estuary has lost more than 95% of its pre-colonial freshwater tidal marshes, primarily due to human development.

As far back as 1748, Benjamin Franklin argued for draining swamps and marshes to improve public health and agriculture, reflecting the prevailing view that led to massive filling in and destruction of wet-

lands. This continued until the passage of the Clean Water Act of 1972 that gave wetlands federal protection and required anyone looking to work in or around them to go through a permitting process.

It’s one thing to protect the wetlands we still have, but how do we restore or recreate lost wetlands? There is a laundry list of challenges standing in the way.

The biggest challenge is money. Working in a dynamic system — affected by tides that go up and down by six to eight feet twice daily, commercial boats and hardened shorelines often developed right to the edge — requires dynamic approaches, which can be costly. Philadelphia shorelines bustled with industry and transport for over a century, creating a legacy of contamination re-

quiring remediation before restoration can even be considered, which can significantly increase costs.

For example, the shuttered Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery in Southwest Philadelphia sold for $225 million, and several hundred million more dollars are needed to remediate the site. This hefty tab is feasible for a developer envisioning a return on investment after building an e-commerce and life sciences hub, but it is out of reach for the usual ecological restoration funding sources.

In 2024, the William Penn Foundation offered $1 million for climate resilience planning in Philadelphia to be split amongst multiple projects. A national grant distributed nearly $91 million to 55 separate grantees. But this investment doesn’t come close to the potentially $1 billion price tag of the private sector development.

Even with capital campaigns, grants and donation matches, not-for-profit restoration cannot compete with private developers.

The largest tidal wetland restorations in Philadelphia, including Pennypack on the Delaware, John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum and FDR Park, have been enabled by compensatory mitigation — regulations that aim for no-net-loss of wetlands by requiring anyone taking away wetlands to enhance, restore or create an equal value of wetlands (at their own expense) within the same watershed. It can be a valuable tool, but since another wetland must be destroyed to trigger mitigation, it doesn’t increase overall wetland acreage.

Despite the valuable projects already mentioned, more wetlands have been lost than created in Philadelphia. Because mitigation can happen anywhere within the same watershed, cost-conscious developers look for the most available and easiest to restore land, often going as far as Bucks County. This also presents an environmental justice issue where communities experiencing the brunt of development lose the benefits of thriving ecosystems and the offsets are provided miles away to a community often with more natural resources.

Another big challenge is lack of space. In natural areas, rivers and wetlands have room to grow and move and adapt. By contrast, hard, permanent infrastructure leaves them with no place to go. In Philadelphia’s cramped S E PTE M B E R 20 24 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 17

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waterfronts, we have small parcels to work with, but restoring a small area of wetlands requires leaping the same regulatory and planning hurdles as larger areas. Even if they cost more per unit, small projects can still be valuable. They’re often our only option.

Culturally, there can be resistance to supporting shoreline and wetland restoration.

PWD senior scientist Lance Butler laments that these aquatic and wetland systems have been so disconnected from the upland area for so long that the public as a whole has a poor perception of them. “To change thinking is a tough thing to do,” Butler says. “It is incumbent on PWD and scientists to educate citizens on how important water resources are, not just drinking water or wastewater or stormwater, but all of the ecological properties that Philadelphia watersheds have. ” Everyone I interviewed mentioned “regulatory hurdles,” the most concrete being the restrictions of the Philadelphia International Airport. The Federal Aviation Administration guidelines recommend that “hazardous wildlife attractants” such as wetlands not be located within five miles of the airport to protect aircraft from potential bird strikes. This restricts a significant amount of historic and potential wetland because of this safety concern.

Other regulations are vague and subject to agency interpretation. Different agencies have different mandates and sometimes their objectives can be at odds, bringing confusion to permit applicants. Randy Brown of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) says: “The greatest challenges to restoring and creating tidal wetlands in Philadelphia are ecological and regulatory.” He explained that regulatory agencies may be hesitant to approve projects where environmental benefits are uncertain.

Concerns are even stronger when structures like breakwaters are proposed, as they may require compensatory mitigation.

In other words, wetlands restoration projects could require wetlands mitigation.

Practitioners wince at the thought of compensatory mitigation being required for a restoration that makes use of innovative technologies widely accepted elsewhere. While these concerns are valid and aim to protect existing resources, they lack a nuanced and holistic understanding of the requirements 18 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 2024

Buckner looks out at the site of a potential wetland from an abandoned pier on the Delaware.

for ecological uplift; structures like breakwaters are often necessary to dampen wave energy to allow for wetland regeneration.

“Regulators have a petulance to not think outside of the box, to not address the whole ecosystem services that a complex tidal wetland can provide, especially in urban areas,” Butler says. He adds that most of the areas along Philadelphia shorelines are tidal mudflats. These expanses of muck are valuable, but oftentimes degraded, and a diversity of habitats including tidal wetlands would provide more ecosystem services.

Collaboration is necessary to get past these hurdles. “Based on models in New Jersey and Delaware, the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary developed a framework for a Living Shorelines committee in Philadelphia to include scientists and regulators as well as community groups to forge technical, regulatory and social understanding of waterfront restoration specific to Philadelphia,” says Ellie Rothermel, urban resilience assistant manager for the partnership.

“Science has not matured to the point where we can accurately evaluate these systems and give the regulators and public an accurate representation of ecosystem services,” Butler says. He explains that while these techniques have been successful in other areas, every watershed is unique and more site-specific research needs to be done to better understand the needs in Philadelphia. Unlike a laboratory, the tidal zone of

an urban area is full of variables that will only be uncovered by experience.

Learning about the environmental and economic benefits of restoration may also incentivize more funding by giving a dollar value to the ecosystem services and open up permitting pathways, says Butler.

The DEP has launched a pilot program to improve permit processing that will give priority review for environmental restoration projects, according to regional communications manager Stephanie Berardi.

In an era of worsening climate change, we need the resilience that wetlands provide more than ever. “The idea of making habitat in a way that is useful for someone other than a human being is somewhat challenging for people,” says Chris Dougherty, project director for the Riverfront North Partnership. “It shows perhaps how stricken nature has become from our lives in this city. It is a crisis of imagination of what these places can be. A rethinking of these spaces could reshape the story of civic infrastructure to be ecologically and socially resilient.”

Back at the decaying pier on the Delaware, we continue to make small progress by conducting more studies to demonstrate the benefits of the designs, backed by DRWC, whose leadership sees the value in piecing together the necessary funding to do the work right the first time. Our team sees the work as a pilot that can pave the way for similar projects throughout Philadelphia. ◆ P HOTO BY JARE D G RUENWA LD

RAINSTORMING How do urban wetlands help protect our city from floodwaters and storm surges?

W R I T T E N A N D I L L U S T R AT E D B Y B R YA N S ATA L I N O Wetlands, often overlooked ecosystems, offer a range of benefits — including flood mitigation. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) notes that wetlands in and downstream of urban areas are especially valuable as they help manage the increased rate and volume of surface-water runoff from impermeable surfaces like pavement and buildings. Here are some ways wetlands mitigate floodwaters and storm surges:

Groundwater Recharge Wetlands can release water back into the ground, which helps to lower the water level in rivers and streams.

This action of slow infiltration and release dampens the effect of floodwaters and storm surges.

Water Storage Wetlands act like enormous sponges, absorbing water through spongy soil and thirsty plant roots. They hold excess rainwater and surface runoff, helping reduce the volume and speed of water flow downstream.

Pollutant Filtration Wetlands can help filter contaminants and debris in urban runoff, protecting water quality while reducing maintenance costs associated with clearing and repairing drainage systems.

Wave Breaking To put it simply, wetlands are made up of muddy soil deposits and water-loving plants. These plant structures both slow and dissipate the wave energy from flooding and storm surges.

Climate Regulation Dead plants take a long time to decay in low-oxygen wetland muck. In the meantime the carbon in the plant matter stays out of the atmosphere.

Over time, this carbon-trapping indirectly influences precipitation patterns and reduces extreme weather events that can lead to flooding.

Fighting Erosion By stabilizing the soil with plant roots, wetlands reduce soil erosion. Those plants also trap sediment carried in the current, which builds up the land. As they grow, wetlands can retain more water and further reduce flood peaks.

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POLICY SHOPPING Navigating flood insurance is complicated, but it’s well worth the effort

Know your flood risk Bounded by rivers and compromised by an antiquated sewer system, our city suffers increasing risk of flooding — especially as climate change continues to cause more intense storms. Before you make decisions about flood insurance, you should understand the flood risk you face. Unfortunately, figuring that out is often more difficult than it should be.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) maps the 100-year floodplain, the area that has a 1% chance of flooding each year or over a 25% chance of flooding over a 30-year mortgage. But FEMA’s maps are not the best source of flood hazard information; they often use outdated data and don’t incorporate flood risk from heavy rainfall.

While FEMA maps show just under 2,500 properties in the 100-year floodplain in Philadelphia, climate risk organization First Street’s (firststreet.org) maps, which account for rainfall-related flooding, estimate that close to 110,000 properties face flooding. This year, the Philadelphia Office of Sustainability plans to release new flood maps that will show where residents have reported flood damages in the past and where flooding is expected over the next few decades.

Why is flood insurance important?

Most families don’t have enough savings to cover the costs of a severe flood on their own. Think FEMA will bail you out? Fed20 GRID P H I L LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 20 24

eral disaster aid isn’t always available and even when it is, the payouts are small; FEMA household disaster grants are typically only a few thousand dollars.

Flood insurance is critical to recovery.

Lack of flood insurance can widen inequality post-disaster. When more people in a community have flood insurance, local economic activity resumes faster.

What is the National Flood Insurance Program?

For over 50 years, FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) has provided most flood insurance. Communities such as Philadelphia join the program, adopting certain regulations for new construction in high-risk areas. In exchange, residents can purchase flood insurance.

Flood insurance has paid over $1 billion in claims in Philadelphia since 1999. The program currently has roughly 3.1 million policies nationwide and close to 3,700 in our city.

Current flood insurance challenges The cost of insuring catastrophic risks is high and in flood-prone areas, this is reflected in higher premiums. This can make it unaffordable for those who need it the most.

Pennsylvania’s Flood Insurance Premium Assistance Task Force has proposed improvements at the state and federal level, as well as insurance innovations to help lower flood insurance costs. Policy reforms include Congress providing assistance with premiums for lower-income households — a proposal that has been around for over a decade and is supported by many groups, including FEMA itself.

At the state level, the task force suggested that Pennsylvania could help communities join the NFIP’s Community Rating System program, which offers premium discounts in communities that take steps to reduce overall flood risk. The task force also proposed subsidies for flood risk reduction measures and state tax deductions for flood insurance premiums.

Carolyn Kousky of the Environmental Defense Fund explains how flood insurance coverage works, and who should get it.

E N V I R O N M E N TA L D E F E N S E F U N D

F

loods are expensive. Homes and the possessions inside them are costly to repair and replace, plus displaced flood victims often have to pay to stay elsewhere while their home is made livable again. Here, we unpack the main tool for helping residents handle those costs: flood insurance.

B Y C A R O LY N K O U S K Y

Number of policies in effect as of January 1, 2024

200

AVERAGE COST

150

$1,233

100

50

0

$0

$1,000

$2,000

$3,000

$4,000

Philadelphia policy cost per unit, 2023

Insurance innovations The NFIP is not a perfect fit for all households at risk, but new and emerging approaches could help. One currently in development is parametric microinsurance.

These are policies that offer smaller limits and lower premiums. They provide fast and flexible dollars that can be used for any disaster needs and pay based on the scale of the flood rather than an assessment of damage.

With the many limitations on what the NFIP will cover and the fact that the median flood insurance claim in Philadelphia is under $900, a parametric microinsurance policy that could quickly provide several thousand dollars or more might appeal to many residents. Other options being explored include nonprofits harnessing insurance to help residents, community-based insurance and embedding insurance in loans for small businesses or vulnerable residents.

What should you know about buying flood insurance?

Anyone in a participating community, like Philadelphia, can buy flood insurance from the NFIP, and you can learn more at floodsmart.gov. Be sure to ask questions of your insurance agent, but also talk to your neighbors and do your own research since agents may not be experts on flood insurance.

Requirements: Anyone at risk can purchase a policy. New policies have a 30-day waiting period before becoming effective.

Coverage details: To protect your home and the stuff inside it, you need to buy both a building (dwelling) policy and a contents policy. Renters can buy a contents-only policy since they are not responsible for structural damage. Each policy will have a maximum payout level, called the coverage cap. In the NFIP, this cap cannot exceed $250,000 for the building and $100,000 for contents. Each policy also has a deductible.

Policyholders are responsible for all costs below the deductible.

Coverage additions and restrictions: NFIP does not provide coverage for additional living expenses if you must live elsewhere while your property is repaired or during evacuation. There is very limited coverage in basements. An NFIP policy, however, will pay you up to $1,000 to avoid losses, such as covering the cost of sandbags or supplies needed to protect your property before a flood.

Insurance can provide coverage that is “replacement cost” (insurance pays you enough to replace or repair what is damaged) or “actual cash value” (you only get the depreciated value). While obscure insurance terms, they are critical to having sufficient funds to rebuild. NFIP policyholders are only given

replacement cost coverage for single family homes that insure at least 80% of the building’s value (that is, choosing a coverage cap that is close to the assessed structural value of the home). All contents, including carpeting and appliances, are only actual cash value — which typically does not provide enough to buy new replacement items.

Lowering risk and lowering costs: There are a few things homeowners can do to lower both their risk of flood damage and insurance premiums. Proper installation of flood openings and elevating heating and cooling systems, water heaters and electrical panels can help. Other options, like elevating a home, can be extremely expensive.

But households receive premiums between 5% and 45% lower when their community supports flood risk reduction through the Community Rating System.

Philadelphia does not currently participate, but some hope that will soon change.

Public or Private: Over 90% of residential flood insurance in the country is provided through the federal NFIP but sold through private firms and agents. There is, however, a small, private flood insurance market, which in Pennsylvania has grown from about 1,500 policies in 2016 to almost 16,000 in 2023. An insurance agent can help you determine if a private firm might offer better pricing or coverage. ◆ S E PTE M B E R 20 24 G R I DP HILLY.COM 21

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WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Updates on grid’s flood reporting in Camden, Venice Island, Eastwick and Northwest Philadelphia

BY ALLISON BECK

In June 2021, Grid published a story on flooding in Camden’s Cramer Hill neighborhood, highlighting the disaster’s disparate impact on low-income communities of color.

Since Grid last checked in, Franco Montalto, an engineering professor and researcher at Drexel University, and his team completed an advanced model that can simulate a variety of different infrastructure updates and climate scenarios in Cramer Hill. “It’s a lot like Minecraft,” says Scott Schreiber, the executive director of Camden County Municipal Utilities Authority (CCMUA). “The area is broken into very small blocks and each one gets a darker shade of blue depending on how much it floods in a situation.”

The team recommended that the CCMUA build a nearly 6-foot-tall drainage pipe under Harrison Street, one of the worst-flooded places in Cramer Hill. Smaller tributary pipes would bring water from surrounding streets to a main pipe that would dump the water into the river.

It won’t be cheap, but thanks to a $20 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA) and the New Jersey Office of Emergency Management, officials say Camden should be able to complete the project. “This is a once-ina-lifetime investment, and so we would be foolish not to incorporate climate change,” Schreiber says. “We spent a lot of time really thoroughly understanding the problem, and then a lot of time designing it. We’re about to get into building it.”

The new system would be built to withstand what FEMA calls a 10-year storm, and will also include green infrastructure, bike lanes and pedestrian improvements — all of which officials say were requested by resi22 GRID P H I L LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 2024

dents. They expect to start construction in early 2025, when they will also begin to address another problem: imported wastewater.

According to Schreiber, Pennsauken Township contributes to flooding and poor water quality in Camden by adding both wastewater and sewage to the City’s already-burdened system. Officials are planning a two-stage project to separate sewage and divert stormwater out of the city and into the Delaware River.

The neighborhood is also getting a facelift thanks to a $35 million Housing and Urban Development Choice Neighborhoods Implementation grant. The process began in Feb-

ruary 2022 when officials broke ground on the new Ablett Village, which is estimated to cost about $145 million.

To qualify for a New Jersey flood hazard general permit, Michaels Organization senior vice president Nick Cangelosi says that the company builds at a foot over the floodplain level, which can mean elevating homes or, in the case of several of their Cramer Hill developments, adding extra layers of material to the ground itself.

“Everybody is evaluating climate change,” Cangelosi says. “The fact that water levels are rising, I think people are starting to get comfortable with it.”

Water Log • Computer modeling based on ground-level research has shown how Camden’s Cramer Hill neighborhood actually floods.

C C M UA A N D D R E X E L- S W R E

Camden

Hurricane Ida’s floodwaters submerged the first floor of the Apex Manayunk apartment complex in September 2021.

KEVIN SMITH

Venice Island In September 2023, Grid reported on residential development on Manayunk’s Venice Island and the floods that washed over the island’s new apartment buildings and townhouses.

In September 2021, Hurricane Ida’s rain pushed the Schuylkill River’s waters into the first two stories of the Venice Island house shared by McKayla McLaughlin, her boyfriend Quinte Scott and their twoweek-old son. In one night, they lost nearly everything — cars, furniture, professional equipment and countless personal items.

Because the family didn’t have flood insurance, nothing was covered. They moved into the South Philly house Scott grew up in, a fixer-upper that his grandfather left to him. “We had to start our whole life over again, just piece by piece putting it back together,” McLaughlin says.

Despite Pennsylvania laws requiring disclosure of a property’s flood history, McLaughlin says that she wasn’t informed that her home was in a flood zone, or how extensive past problems had been. She also reports that no one from property management or the ownership group contacted them to help the family to get back on their feet. JRK Property Holdings did not respond to Grid’s request for comment.

You will never control nature, and therefore you work within it.”

J O H N H U N T E R, Manayunk Neighborhood Council McLaughlin still wants answers.

“There just should be certain requirements,” McLaughlin says. “Why would you continue to have people move in, or why would you not make it so that if a flood did happen, it wouldn’t have such an effect on the tenants?”

One post-Ida change to the zoning code is a new requirement for buildings in the flood zone: mandatory pedestrian evacuation routes. The Isle Apartments is a four-story residential construction atop a parking area on the ground level that adheres to the new code. It has a pedestrian bridge to Main Street crossing the Manayunk Canal, which can be accessed at any time.

But even Main Street has been known to flood, raising questions about the efficacy of such a measure.

Some proposed developments, like the one at 3900 Main Street, rely on early warning systems to alert residents to a potential flood.

The Schuylkill has a tendency to rise rapidly at night, causing additional concerns about residents’ awareness of danger approaching.

When Ida hit, “people went to bed and found their cars floating in the garage, or they couldn’t get out because the stairs were completely underwater,” says John Hunter, an architect and the zoning chair with the Manayunk Neighborhood Council.

Another building, at 4045 Main Street, which was once a family-run yarn-dyeing facility but closed after severe flooding from Ida, has an evacuation route on the back of the property which connects to Shurs Lane.

But with updated floodplain estimates, it may be unsafe by 2050.

Hunter has a different vision for what Venice Island — and the rest of the neighborhood’s waterfront — could be.

He says he understands that developers and business owners want to continue building up Main Street in order to get a return on their investments, but also believes that there needs to be a long-term vision for the space.

“What we’ve been pushing the [Philadelphia City] Planning Commission to consider is what is now called a resiliency park,” Hunter says. The land is restored to S E PTE M B E R 20 24 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 23

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a more natural state that’s better able to absorb flood waters and recover, reducing the overall impact of a given storm.

The park could also become a leisure space for hiking, biking and running, a concept that has been applied in other nearby states including New Jersey and Delaware.

Building out that type of concept requires several things: mass purchasing of the lots by the City or another entity and a longterm plan for the space, for starters.

But Hunter says that the move is a necessary acknowledgement of the changes the land is going to go through, developments or not. “You will never control nature, and therefore you work within it.”

Germantown resident Rev. Chester Williams keeps valuables off the floor in his basement, but the floods and persisting dampness still damage the plaster.

Eastwick In January 2024, Grid covered the efforts to design a flood barrier for Southwest Philadelphia’s Eastwick neighborhood. At the time, the City had just presented designs by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at a community meeting.

On July 2, 2024, FEMA and the Biden administration announced that they would be providing $2.12 million in aid to install temporary barriers along Cobbs Creek, which is often responsible for the heavy flooding Eastwick residents experience. An additional $1.38 million had been secured through Congresswoman Mary Scanlon (D-PA, 5th District) to support the barriers and surrounding community engagement efforts by City government.

The barriers, which are made of wire mesh and large bags of sand, stand at about four feet tall. They have been used in the past to protect flood-prone and flood-affected areas, including reportedly holding back 1.5-foot storm surges in parts of New Orleans during hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

According to material from a town hall meeting in April 2024, the barriers will be stacked to create an eight-foot wall that will protect approximately 600 homes for between five and 10 years. But evacuations will still be necessary for large storms.

A more long-term solution to replace the barriers has hit a snag — one that has been steadily growing since October 2023.

Despite releasing a draft study promoting a 1,400-foot-long levee, the Army Corps of 24 GRID P H IL LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 2024

Engineers has changed course after months of pushback from residents of both Eastwick and surrounding communities.

“That levee [model] resulted in 14 inches of induced flooding, which was unacceptable to everybody around the room,” says Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Beeman during a public meeting CBS Philadelphia reported on this summer. As a result, the team is going back to the drawing board, with proposals on floodwater storage and transfer options as well as wetland expansion.

The new report is set to be finalized in spring 2025.

Northwest Philadelphia In April 2024, Grid reported on flooding in Northwest Philadelphia. While not much has physically changed since, new initiatives and leadership in water management have emerged.

Justin DiBerardinis is the new executive director of Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership, replacing Julie Slavet, who recently retired. With a background in environmental stewardship and education, including a decade of experience with Bartram’s Garden, DiBerardinis has a special focus on community engagement, particularly when it comes to the parts of water management that aren’t so easy to understand.

“It’s so important for communities to un-

derstand what’s going on, because we need public will to create the political will to change things for the better,” DiBerardinis says. “It’s the things you can’t see, the things underground — City projects connecting people to stormwater and watersheds, that makes a big impact.”

He also points to City programs, including the Germantown Waterway Arts Initiative and Wingo-WHAT? projects, which use art to not only connect people with the inner workings of these systems, but also allows people to process the trauma flooding causes.

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Water Department is continuing its combination of green and traditional infrastructure efforts in the area.

But, with few updates on the City’s efforts to begin building the Wingohocking Relief Sewer Tunnel, which could cost up to $800 million and take a decade or more to complete, and recent reporting on the mixed results of the Green City, Clean Waters initiative, residents are left to consider an uncertain future.

The City did not respond to requests for comment. ◆

P HOTO BY CHRIS BAKER EVENS

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the RISING WATERS i s su e

UPSTREAM, DOWNSTREAM The Delaware Valley needs large-scale, regional planning to effectively address flooding.

What’s in place is local and piecemeal

Mont Clare, Montgomery County, was just one Schuylkill River town flooded by the remnants of Hurricane Ida in 2021.

26 GRID P H I L LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 20 24

officially begins at 11 feet, and the device can measure waters as high as 24 feet. But the creek rose off the charts, with eventual estimates topping out at a record 26.5 feet.

When the waters subsided, destruction emerged. Across the Perkiomen watershed, 75 homes were destroyed, uncounted businesses suffered damages and two residents had died. Statewide, estimates of the storm’s cost eclipsed $100 million.

“It was a devastating flood, and obviously one of the reasons why my staff and I have been interested in a number of policy

actions around watershed flooding,” Rep. Webster says.

His district and its creekfront towns sit near the bottom of the 362-square-mile Perkiomen watershed, which spans 55 municipalities across four counties. Trying to solve the problem locally came with obvious limitations; Rep. Webster determined he needed upstream buy-in to move the needle on reducing flooding from future storms.

But three years later, his efforts illuminate the seemingly intractable problem of winning support for regional floodplain

M I C H A E L S TO K E S F L I C K R

D

uring his third year in office as a Pennsylvania State Representative, Joe Webster found a menace hiding within his bucolic Montgomery County district. Snaking its way through the landscape, lurking beneath bridges near the downtowns of Schwenksville, Graterford and Collegeville, the Perkiomen Creek was lying in wait.

When the remnants of Hurricane Ida arrived in September 2021, the typically peaceful creek erupted. At a U.S. Geological Survey water gauge at Graterford, flood stage

BY KYLE BAGENSTOSE

management anywhere in Pennsylvania.

At the State House, Rep. Webster re-introduced H.B. 1275, a decade-old piece of legislation he inherited that would overhaul protections for riparian buffers, strips of vegetation that can slow the entry of heavy rains into waterways and mitigate flood damages. According to Maya van Rossum, the Delaware Riverkeeper, the bill is one of the most important for flood mitigation in Pennsylvania at a watershed scale.

Over the decades, development has exacerbated flooding along the Delaware and its myriad tributaries, including the Perkiomen. Combined with climate change’s extreme rainfall, one 2020 study estimated the twin dynamics could increase flooding discharge in the watershed up to 66% by century’s end.

Despite this increasingly grim reality, van Rossum says there have been strikingly few large-scale initiatives to address the issue.

Following a series of devastating floods that struck Delaware River towns in Bucks County in the 2000s (which also impacted floodprone Philadelphia neighborhoods such as Manayunk), van Rossum joined the Interstate Flood Mitigation Task Force, created by the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), a joint state-federal entity overseeing the watershed. In 2007 the task force released a 151page report with a series of recommendations.

Some, such as a flood warning system, were implemented, van Rossum says.

But she adds that the most “substantive” sections of the report — including a wishlist of recommended policy changes, such as buyouts for flood-prone properties and mandatory flood disclosure requirements for real estate transactions — have since “sat on the shelf.” For its part, a DRBC spokesperson said the effort “primarily” guided flood mitigation efforts at the local and state levels, and that the commission has focused on developing “tools and information” for localities.

“With increased understanding of the effects of climate change on hydrology, best available science and current best practices for floodplain management have evolved since the 1970s, when the DRBC Floodplain Regulations (FPR) were adopted,” spokesperson Elizabeth Koniers Brown wrote in an email. “As resources become available, the FPR are expected to undergo revision based upon the best available science.”

Repairing the riparian One key policy change recommended by the 2007 report was to better protect the watershed’s riparian buffers, which is why Rep. Webster’s H.B. 1275 caught van Rossum’s eye more than 16 years later. Webster says that after Democrats took control of the House for the first time in more than a decade in 2022 — just a year after Ida — he sensed an opening. Webster sits on the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, and after a decade in minority-party purgatory, committee chair Rep. Greg Vitali (D-Delaware County) gave the bill a hearing in October 2023. The Riverkeepers supported it, as did an interesting coalition of rod-and-gun groups who like riparian buffers for their boosting of game habitat, Webster says.

Real estate industry groups opposed the bill for what they warned would be dramatic restrictions on development. But those

state’s Growing Greener grants program.

Rep. Webster doesn’t believe that improving floodplain management is a priority for the state. The third-term lawmaker says his quest for solutions to flooding in his district coincided with his education on the political winds that have long blown in the halls of power in Harrisburg. After he was first elected in 2018, Webster recalls entering the State Capitol building and examining the ornamentation decorating the lofty rotunda, where murals and stained glass windows spell out the state’s civic virtues.

“Liberty and justice and education,” Rep. Webster observed. “And oil and gas and coal.”

Rep. Webster notes the DEP has been stripped of hundreds of staff members over the past several decades, a period of time in which Republicans have controlled most levers of power in Harrisburg. He believes the defunding has left the department with

Pennsylvania has been unable to deal with not only [flooding], and what’s happening in the environment, but second, the cumulative effects of development.”

J O E W E B ST E R, PA State Representative, Montgomery County

familiar with the politics say it was opposition from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) that has left the bill in committee limbo. In an email to Grid, Rep. Vitali shared a list of six issues that the DEP took with the bill, most of which suggested conflicts with other state codes, which Rep. Vitali framed as “technical and not political” opposition.

In an email, the DEP did not directly respond to a question from Grid regarding its apparent opposition. However, DEP press secretary Neil Shader listed a number of initiatives he says the DEP has undertaken, including a flood protection program that since 1946 has installed more than 200 projects across the state, such as concrete channels, floodwalls and levees; as well as floodplain restoration efforts funded through the

a kind of “post-traumatic stress disorder” that causes it to recoil from major changes.

“I would say their reaction to the bill was, ‘I should have 20 people in my department. I have six and you’re giving me more work to do,’” Rep. Webster says. “I’m compassionate about that … but if that’s the case, tell us you need more people in your organization … don’t say we don’t believe in environmental laws.”

Between a bay and a hardscape Abby Sullivan, chief resilience officer for Philadelphia’s Office of Sustainability, knows how helpful a regional approach is to mitigating flooding in the city. She notes Philadelphia is not only situated toward the bottom of a Delaware River watershed that has become ever-more developed, but S E PTE M B E R 20 24 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 27

the RISING WATERS i s su e

Abby Sullivan, chief resilience officer for the Office of Sustainability, says there is no regional planning around flood mitigation, leaving municipalities on their own.

is also subject to tidal action from the south.

So hardscapes in either direction can exacerbate flooding here.

And while the city’s complex political machinery can create internal conflict about which flood mitigation efforts it should pursue (look no further than Eastwick) Sullivan says there doesn’t appear to be much on the policy menu for trying to coordinate with entities outside of city limits.

“We could do everything in our power in the city to protect, but if everybody upstream is doing practices that make flooding worse, it’s a really big challenge,” Sullivan says, adding that she’s “not aware of an entity that’s proactively planning for flooding at a regional scale.”

Rep. Webster says the challenge in tackling regional-level flooding starts with the fractious nature of Pennsylvania’s political system. According to Governing.com, Pennsylvania has 2,625 county and local governments, third most of any state. Each one is given significant local authority to set zoning codes, and the state’s conservative past has also bent toward the rights of property owners.

28 GRID P H IL LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 2024

We could do everything in our power in the city to protect, but if everybody upstream is doing practices that make flooding worse, it’s a really big challenge.”

A B BY S U L L I VA N , Philadelphia Office of Sustainability “We have a problem where Pennsylvania has been unable to deal with not only [flooding], and what’s happening in the environment, but second, the cumulative effects of development,” Rep. Webster says.

Josh Lippert, a professional floodplain manager and former chair of Philadelphia’s Flood Risk Management Task Force, says the matter is even further complicated by policies that prohibit staff at many municipalities from engaging in lobbying work.

When he previously worked for the City of Pittsburgh, he and colleagues could at least work with Allegheny County, which contains both Pittsburgh and its surrounding townships. But in Philadelphia, he says,

there aren’t many options in the toolbox for program staff to make their case to powerbrokers outside the city, leaving it in the hands of politicians, who may or may not be interested in doing so.

“There really aren’t those mechanisms within the City government to do that type of lobbying work,” Lippert says. “It’s a conundrum.”

Still, the landscape isn’t completely devoid of entities in position to make a difference. Many point to the DRBC as perhaps the most obvious political body. As the commission is controlled by the governors of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Delaware, as well as a representative from P HOTO BY CHRIS BAKER EVENS

the federal government, regulatory changes like those laid out in the 2007 report are heavy political lifts. But spokesperson Koniers Brown says the agency partnered with New Jersey state agencies in 2008 to develop a “multi-jurisdictional flood mitigation plan” for 43 municipalities there.

“This initiative helped participating communities become more disaster resistant by identifying measures for reducing their longterm risks from flooding and enabling them to better compete for FEMA funding aimed at flood mitigation,” Koniers Brown said.

State governments indeed have the authority to enact change for their portions of the watershed. Lippert notes that in 1978, Pennsylvania lawmakers actually passed a bill that required municipalities statewide to participate in the National Flood Insurance Program, a federal initiative that requires local governments to adopt minimum standards for floodplain management in exchange for the ability to secure federally-backed flood insurance for residents.

Some also point to the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, a federallydesignated Metropolitan Planning Organization, which has done some work around flooding. Lippert in particular notes the commission developed a climate model to help local governments understand the effects of climate change and sea level rise.

But once again, without the force of law, he says its impact is limited.

“It’s a great interactive map but it’s not used to do actual, built environment decision making,” Lippert says. “It’s largely sat on the shelf.”

A deep state to stop deep floods?

Despite the lack of a comprehensive effort to address watershed-wide flooding, many are finding some solace in a surprising group of people: the next generation of bureau-

crats and engineers. From this perspective, things feel like they’re moving in the right direction, with innovative thinkers currently developing the foundations on which future floodplain practitioners can build something better.

Lisa Auermuller is administrative director of the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub (MACH), a collection of 13 institutions headquartered at Rutgers University, propelled by a $20 million National Science Foundation grant to study flood resiliency from New York City to Philadelphia. She says MACH operates as a kind of free research and development lab for municipal governments, consulting with professionals like Sullivan to answer critical hyperlocal questions; the lab even keeps in its arsenal a van equipped with lasers to drive around cities and create detailed floodplain maps.

But MACH can also help with softer sciences, such as finding social inequities in a community that can aid applications for grant money for flood resilience, which is particularly beneficial for smaller municipalities without a wealth of professional staff.

While such efforts don’t do much to solve a watershed-wide collective action problem in the near term, Auermiller says interactions between students and scientists working under MACH and government officials like Sullivan could pay major dividends in the future. Clinton Andews, a professor of urban planning at Rutgers and MACH member, adds that he believes their experiences will eventually even lead to regulatory changes.

“You get all these scientists and engineers to think about reforming professional practices … the knowledge base that the planners and municipal engineers and the accounts use,” Andrews says. “That’s how you get change institutionalized. It’s not just by trying to lobby government, or persuading individual households.”

Rep. Webster is pushing for similar innovation with Pennsylvania’s political machinery. While he continues to work to pass H.B. 1275 (which would face a potentially impossible hill to climb in the Republican-controlled State Senate), the representative is also spearheading “The Perkiomen Project,” a voluntary effort to bring together county and municipal officials, along with institutions like universities and chambers of commerce, to seek watershed-wide flooding solutions.

Most notably, Webster says the project has obtained money to do advanced mapping of the Perkiomen watershed. Ultimately, he hopes it will identify areas where infrastructure can be improved to reduce flooding.

Then, he can seek more funding and political support to make it happen.

“If it turns out that, 100 miles west of something, that’s where a project should be built … then it’s my job to bring [that community] money, bring resources,” Rep. Webster says. “We’re not trying to build a mandate where we tell some small municipality they have a $30 million problem.”

Under this system, solutions could get creative. Instead of paying $10 million to build a levee that protects one downstream community but floods another, the money could be spent upstream preventing too much water from getting there in the first place. Lippert, who counts himself among the forward-thinking practitioners, says such creative efforts might just become the laws of the future.

“Once you prove the concept, then maybe adopt the [regulations] to make this a more statewide initiative,” Lippert says. ◆

S E PTE M B E R 20 24 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 29

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More rain could fall on flood-prone places like Norristown, Montgomery County, than current models predict. With the release of Atlas 15, projections should become more accurate.

WHEN IT RAINS, IT POURS Federal program is finally incorporating climate change into precipitation frequency estimates, giving developers and engineers access to more accurate projections

30 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 2024

more extreme precipitation. Recent analysis

by PWD of rainfall data from the past two decades shows that Ida-level flooding along the Schuylkill is now more like a onceevery-30-year event.

Then comes the real kicker: PWD calculated that, if our planet follows a high greenhouse gas emission scenario, such flooding could become a once-every-six-years proposition by the end of the century.

PWD’s forward-looking modeling efforts are important. Unfortunately, they are uncommon. Many engineers across the country designing infrastructure that could last for decades, if not centuries, are still relying on a pre-global warming paradigm that usually assumes precipitation patterns will remain static.

Some agencies, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), are trying to turn the ship.

Holding up the skies In Greek mythology, the titan Atlas is sentenced by Zeus to forever hold up the heavens. Now, it’s NOAA’s Atlas program tasked with protecting us from crashing skies.

The program launched in the middle of the 20th century, when the United States went on a New Deal infrastructure spree of dam and highway construction. Engineers of many stripes suddenly needed to know: Just how much rainfall should they design such massive projects for?

“The federal agencies were looking for authoritative datasets to help inform the

M I C H A E L S TO K E S F L I C K R

I

n early September 2021, the remnants of Hurricane Ida swept through Southeastern Pennsylvania, destroying hundreds of homes, resulting in more than a hundred million dollars in economic damages and killing five people.

Much of the pain was felt within the Schuylkill River watershed, where Ida left homes and businesses flooded from Schwenksville to Norristown to Philadelphia. Analysis by the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) later determined that, based on 20th century rainfall data, the river’s flooding under Ida was the kind of event you’d expect to see once every 65 years or so — once in a lifetime.

But this is not your grandfather’s Southeastern Pennsylvania. As climate change has intensified, the region has experienced

BY KYLE BAGENSTOSE

design of civil engineering infrastructure,” says Fernando Salas, director of the GeoIntelligence Division of NOAA’s Office of Water Prediction. The Environmental Science Services Administration’s (now NOAA) Weather Bureau (now the National Weather Service) was selected.

In the decades since, the Atlas program has dependably delivered 14 volumes of national precipitation data, now considered a gold standard. Engineers across the country use the data to understand just how much the clouds overhead can open up — critical information in designing everything from a storm inlet in the Florida Keys to a nuclear power plant in Washington State.

Historically, Atlas has relied on past precipitation data, but climate change increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall is throwing water on that approach.

Enter another crucial chapter for America’s built environment: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Passed in 2022, the law set aside some $30 million to support a fundamental shift in the Atlas program. While Atlas previously generated updated rainfall data only when a state asked and paid for it, the new funding supports a comprehensive, nationwide update free of charge to states.

Crucially, the update, named Atlas 15, will also incorporate climate change for the first time, Salas says.

But the science isn’t easy. Modeling under Atlas was already a challenge, as program staff had to wrangle and organize massive amounts of precipitation data while also considering geospatial variables like elevation to calculate precipitation estimates even in places far away from the nearest weather station.

“It’s a huge effort,” Salas says. “Trying to adjust what we think the precipitation will look like over mountain ranges, or in

It’s a huge effort, trying to adjust what we think the precipitation will look like over mountain ranges, or in low-lying areas, or wherever.”

F E R N A N D O SA L AS, NOAA Office of Water Prediction low-lying areas, or wherever.”

Now, the challenge is layering on climate change decades into the future, an inherently uncertain exercise. To do so, Salas says NOAA relied on international climate models like those developed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which can help predict changes in extreme rainfall. Because such models vary greatly between bestand worst-case scenarios and come with different degrees of scientific uncertainty, Atlas 15 will provide engineers with a kind of choose-your-own adventure interface as it rolls out over the next few years.

“One could look at projections as a function of global warming level. So, ‘Hey, I’m assuming it’s going to be two degrees [warmer] by 2070,’ and then you can pull up those values,” Salas says, adding that engineers can also choose other models and timespans, “depending on the life of the particular piece of infrastructure they’re building.”

Learning to adapt Although NOAA is on the cusp of delivering game-changing precipitation models, it will be up to the nation’s engineers to use it.

That presents a whole other challenge, says Lauren McPhillips, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Pennsylvania

Riverine Flood Protection

P H I L A D E L P H I A WAT E R D E PA R T M E N T

Changing Flood Return Intervals

State University.

Nationally, many engineers rely on the guidance of organizations like the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). McPhillips says such organizations are largely taking climate change seriously and “really trying to push it forward.” But they’re fighting against decades of professional inertia.

A major challenge is that engineers employed by state and local governments are often bound to regulations created by pertinent legislative bodies. That can create political difficulties, as engineering to newer, more demanding precipitation standards can cost more. There’s also the hurdle of culture change, as older engineers may simply feel less comfortable in applying newer methods, which prompts McPhillips to place a premium on the education of the next generation of engineers.

Climate change isn’t waiting around for such professional turnover, but McPhillips says that in Pennsylvania, there is some near-term promise. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) maintains a guidance for stormwater management that she says is regularly used to inform the engineering of new construction projects. The DEP is working on an update to the manual for the first time in nearly 20 years, and McPhillips says a

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draft currently instructs engineers to use the 90th percentile extreme rain event, as opposed to a median figure used previously.

Even before the release of Atlas 15, the change would effectively prod engineers to account for a changing climate with more intense rainfalls.

“It’s still not taking climate models and more precise values,” McPhillips says, “but it’s providing some safety factors pushing design to a higher level.”

In Philadelphia, Abby Sullivan, chief resilience officer for the Office of Sustainability (OOS), says there are also some proactive actions being taken. At the moment, there is no blanket requirement for City agencies to use a climate-conscious precipitation model, which often results in the current Atlas 14 models being the default. However, some agencies have endeavored to do more, particularly PWD, which leveraged outside consultant CDM Smith to develop its own, localized, forward-looking precipitation models when designing infrastructure.

Sullivan adds that OOS is also working to provide better information to other departments. In one instance, the office purchased access to models from the First Street Foundation, a national nonprofit that develops climate-sensitive data it says is more accurate than current federal counterparts. The models have taken some heat, and are not typically as accurate as hyperlocal efforts like those made by PWD, but Sullivan says they can be used to demonstrate current and future risks not identified by standard tools.

At the moment, Sullivan says she’s not even sure a city-wide, “prescriptive” regulatory approach is the right way to go. Decisions might naturally vary case-to-case, such as with one engineer who’s building a road that can be allowed to flood, while another is building a critical sewer pipe that should never go underwater.

“We’re trying to have more geospatial tools, have one place where people can see, what are the sea level rise projections?

Where’s flooding going to be? Things that people can toggle on and off,” Sullivan says.

“But we’re not there yet.” ◆

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Getting into the flow of an environmental career Virtual Café Join the MES program team from 12-1 p.m. on the first Tuesday of every month for an online chat about your interests and goals.

Log in with us.

www.facebook.com/UPennEES @Penn_MES_MSAG

“Water is an incredibly precious resource,” says Bo Nash (MES ’24).

“Don’t take the water that you have for granted, whether it’s a clean lake that you could swim in or clean water that you trust to drink.” As a research fellow at The Water Center at Penn, Bo worked with students at Paul Robeson High School on monitoring local stream health and learning about the environment. “What you do on the land is going to affect what’s in the water, and vice versa,” he says. “Having a connection to the water instills in us that this place is ours, and something to take pride in.”

In Penn’s Master of Environmental Studies (MES) degree, Bo took courses in hydrology, wetlands ecology, and sustainable water development—but his environmental education went far beyond the classroom, from a close examination of Wissahickon water quality data to a global water conference in Sweden. “You can absolutely make the most of this program,” says Bo. “It’s so flexible, and there are so many different opportunities.”

To learn more about why and how Bo is working toward a career in water, visit:

www.upenn.edu/grid