page_title: Philadelphia Water Department
section_title: Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI)
hierarchical_section_title: Philadelphia Water Department / Green initiatives / Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI)
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustration of a combined sewer system.
context_page_description: The Philadelphia Water Department is the public water utility for the City of Philadelphia. PWD provides integrated potable water, wastewater, and stormwater services for Philadelphia and some communities in Bucks, Delaware and Montgomery counties. PWD is a municipal agency of the City of Philadelphia, and is seated in rented space at the Jefferson Tower in the Market East area of Center City, Philadelphia.
  The primary mission of the department is the planning, operation and maintenance of both the physical infrastructure and the organized personnel needed to provide high quality drinking water, and to provide an adequate and reliable water supply for all domestic, commercial, and industrial requirements, and to manage wastewater and stormwater to protect and improve the quality of the region's watersheds, especially the Delaware River and the Schuylkill River.
  The department is responsible for delivering safe drinking water to more than 1.7 million people in Philadelphia and Lower Bucks County. It is also committed to protecting and bolstering the health and vitality of the region's waterways.
context_section_description: One of the environmentally-friendly initiatives of Philadelphia Water is incorporating green stormwater infrastructure around the city as a part of its Green City, Clean Waters initiative.
  On April 12, 2012, the EPA joined the Mayor of Philadelphia, Mayor Michael Nutter, to announce a federal endorsement of Philadelphia Water's plan to use GSI toward its goal of becoming America's greenest city.
  More than a hundred years ago, Philadelphia built its sewers so that sewage, stormwater runoff, and gray water would all flow underground into the same pipe. When a high level of water threatened the pipes' integrity, they structured these pipes to overflow into the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers in an event called a combined sewer overflow (CSO). In these circumstances, the sewage content in these pipes and pollution from the streets jeopardizes the cleanliness of these rivers. The department has been focusing on how to use green infrastructure that stores stormwater and releases it into the sewers gradually in order to minimize these events. Philadelphia Water aims to protect the watershed with Green Stormwater Infrastructure and create a more environmentally friendly city.
  Green City, Clean Waters involves the installment of various soil-water-plant systems that will filter contaminants out of stormwater, returning some of it to the ground, releasing some to the air, and some slowly back into the sewer system. This process targets impervious city surfaces such as streets and the roofs of buildings. The increased land development leads to more impervious surfaces and causes an increase in stormwater runoff and consequently combined sewer overflows. CSOs endanger the quality of Philadelphia's watersheds because they result in the pollution of rivers and streams.
caption: A picture summary of how CSO works
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