Philadelphia Weekly

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Troubled waters: The creek has unacceptable levels of fecal bacteria.

Photo by Irina Zhorov

The Philadelphia Water Department’s recent confirmation that the Monoshone Creek is severely polluted with high levels of sewage comes as no surprise to residents who’ve walked along the watershed. It’s just a testament to what they’ve seen, smelled and suspected for years: The community creek where children and pets swim during the summer is full of shit.


In early May, the Water Department put out the first of a series of widely anticipated quarterly reports—the agency is required to test four times a year 
according to its permit regulations—
on the water quality of the Monoshone,
which flows along Lincoln Drive through historic RittenhouseTown in 
Germantown and drains into the 
Wissahickon Creek right where it makes a sharp turn at Forbidden Drive.


The report is a two-page newsletter with some background information on the watershed, the challenges of a separate sewer system, a list of recent emergency events and fecal coliform counts for the past two years. It’s about as detailed as a second-grade science textbook, the numbers only go back two years, and the sewer diagram is not representative of the sewers in the area. 


But it does contain the validating Holy Grail that residents and activists have been clamoring for: Results from fecal coliform sampling at wastewater Outfall 5, the largest of seven outfalls that drain into the Monoshone creek, reveal consistently high levels of fecal bacteria. The last two samplings for September and December 2008 are 138,000 and 191,000 parts per 100 milligrams, respectively. The Environmental Protection Agency standard is 200 per 100 milligrams. 


Based on volume, Outfall 5 could be regarded as the creek’s headwaters. It unloads the city’s polluted storm-water runoff from 630 acres in Germantown, which accounts for about 74 percent of the total storm-water deposits into the Monoshone Creek. During dry weather, the Outfall should emit a trickle of spring water; instead, there’s a gaping abyss that oozes a mephitic ribbon of gray flow. 


The Monoshone appears as a foot-wide trickle that gurgles in a muddy streambed nestled in skunk cabbage and lesser celandines. Not far downstream it passes under an overgrown Wissahickon schist bridge and emerges on the other side as a gushing creek and proceeds down a small waterfall into murky, blue-gray standing pools and onward to RittenhouseTown where, as the weather gets nicer, kids will soon swim. 


“I’ve seen people in RittenhouseTown getting in the water, and sometimes I wonder if I should even tell them how bad it is,” says Jan Deruiter, a local resident who’s heading park revitalization efforts in the Wissahickon and is a member of Park Pups. “It looks so idyllic, and you just want it to be.” 


While residents are glad the newsletter has finally been released, they complain that getting anything out of the Water Department is like pulling teeth. 


“Before this newsletter appeared … we hadn’t seen any data from the Water Department about the Monoshone. And we had been asking for it,” says Isabel Pilling, a science teacher and member of the community group Northwest Greens. 


Joanne Dahme, head of public relations for the Water Department, says the Monoshone has been getting cleaner, but when asked if this information could be publicly verified in graph or chart form, she replied, “No, this is just some of the data we’ve been looking at … you’re only going to see four samples a year. So we just kind of reviewed those samples, to see that long-term decrease in the trend.” (Requests to see the most recent sample results, taken in early May, were declined.)


The general downward trend and the decreased coliform counts that Dahme refers to are likely due to the Water Department’s efforts in the watershed. 


Tests in 2003 revealed that a missing section of bricks in the sanitary sewer was causing an infiltration into the storm water sewer and draining via Outfall 5. 


In July 2004, a contractor released a plastic-y goo to coat the inside of this small section, treating its length from Washington Lane to Arbutus Street. Pilling calls this patch the “sewer condom,” and it seemed to help the problem somewhat.


Then the Water Department instituted a citywide “defective lateral program,” which inspects for incorrect plumbing. Some of the sewers were installed improperly from the get-go; there are dual connections where the waste drain and storm-water drain both connect to the storm sewer, and cross connections where the waste drain is hooked up to the storm sewer and the storm runoff drain to the sanitary sewer. As the 
infrastructure ages, deteriorating sewers leak their respective loads into the wrong pipe. 


Many of the pipes share a common trench, and with natural wear the contents of the pipes mix, effectively resulting in one big sewer that vomits everything into the creek. 


The defective lateral program checks for erroneous connections, but not for natural wear. “The problem with interconnections from the public viewpoint is if we track those down … that would not be something that the city would pay for,” says Dahme. “That would be the property owner’s problem.”


Charles Parsons, president of the 
Philadelphia Watershed Alliance, says the Water Department is dancing around the real issue. 


“They’re still clinging to [interconnections], presenting that to the public as if this is the problem,” he says, while running his finger along color-coded maps of the sewers. “It’s not the problem. They don’t want to talk about private sewers.”


The private sewers were “built by developers who didn’t want to meet the city’s standard design and construction requirements,” says Drew Brown, manager of public education at the 
Water Department. “Those private sewers discharge to city sewers, but the city doesn’t maintain the private sewers nor take responsibility for them when they have a problem.”