City of Philadelphia Office of Watersheds

Today I attended a presentation at the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Environmental Studies given by Howard M. Neukrug of the Office of Watersheds, City of Philadelphia. This is part of a series of presentations provided by Department of Earth and Environmental Science. There is a permanent link to the left University of Penn IES.

Date: October 15, 2008
Time: NOON - 1:30 pm
Place: Carolyn Hoff Lynch Auditorium
On the Penn campus: Chemistry Building; 34 & Spruce St

The presentation description was:

"Philadelphia's declaration that it will be the greenest city in the world is an energizing call to action for the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD). As the department charged with ensuring optimal compliance with the City’s federal Clean Water Act (CWA) permit, PWD is striving to define an infrastructure management program that protects and enhances our region’s waterways by managing stormwater runoff in a way that significantly reduces the need for pipes. Over the past year we have crafted a vision that focuses on the treatment of publicly-owned land – city properties, streets, right-of-ways – land surfaces that constitute 45 percent of the impervious land area of the City - that modifies the relationship between land and stormwater. This sustainable, environmentally beneficial treatment is known as green infrastructure.

The goal of our Green Infrastructure program is to reduce the impervious cover in our communities – the hard surfaces such as asphalt and concrete that make up the largest percentage of land – that results in the greatest amount of stormwater runoff. We look at our City’s streets with an eye that seeks sometimes modest and sometimes grand opportunities to peel back some of the existing concrete and asphalt to recreate a green element that welcomes the rain – storing, draining and cleaning it. Ideally, when we complete a public land transformation, the new green infrastructure will manage the first one inch of rainfall that would normally flow along its street gutters and into its storm drains within the targeted drainage area.

PWD believes that money spent on stormwater management and the attainment of CWA goals should also represent money spent to improve the natural resources of the city and to enhance the community. To this end, PWD is working to incorporate its green approach into a larger citywide sustainability policy to address not only water resources issues, but to also address other environmental issues such as air quality, waste product reuse, urban heat island mitigation, carbon sequestration, and energy conservation. However, we cannot implement a Green Infrastructure program in a vacuum. Retrofitting a street or public facility is certainly more costly than building new infrastructure as a component of a complete renewal project. For PWD to solely focus on retrofit opportunities, our limited funding will be poorly invested. We believe the ideal is a true city-wide partnership, one that would result in an incredibly innovative, cost-effective and transforming approach to how city departments revitalize its neighborhoods to make them a healthier and more sustainable place in our little corner of the biosphere."

After the presentation I was actually able to find a copy of the slides online using the magic of the Internet.

This was a nice presentation and it was refreshing to see someone excited about the challenges and talk in terms of time lines and goals ranging from 1 year to 30 years to 100 years. I have not seen or heard such vision since my youth while working for the FAA and Hughes Aircraft long before deregulation.

There was a rather large audience and many questions after the presentation. I had many comments and questions I wanted to offer but I controlled myself in a rare moment of keeping a low profile.

There were 3 topics that surfaced which illustrate the need for System Engineering and a System View. The first one was that of planting trees, the second was green roofs, the third was the water management approach.

Since I was born in Philadelphia and lived there to about age 10 I actually have some subject matter expertise in 2 of these areas.

I remember as a child tree lined streets and trees in the small back yards of the brown stones. Back then we called them row houses. The big issue when I was a child circa 1960 was related to the trees damaging sidewalks, streets, water lines, and sewer lines. All the parents feared that their trees might cost them some serious money. It hit home in our house after a big storm when a neighbor lost 2 rather large trees in their back yard. When these great trees were forced down by nature they crossed the yards of 3 neighbors, smashed fences, and scared a few folks. Yes they were big. By the time the late 60's and early 70's rolled around most of the trees were gone, replaced by concrete. The city really got ugly at that point and I was living among trees in a New Jersey Suburb with housing lots that could safely tolerate trees. I have a theory that you need about 1/4 of an acre to safely support green buffer zones between houses. But it is just a theory, I have no analysis to back it up - where is the System Engineering...

I also remember living with flat roofs. They were all slanted but no matter what you did they always leaked. I am not sure what it means when you create a green roof but I hope maintainability is part of the system engineering analysis that is used for the solution of a green roof.

I need to confess I know nothing about water management. The presentation was thus very enlightening. Especially the part where I learned the home sewer water is mixed with the street water runoff. This is apparently an acceptable approach to sewer management except when it rains. At that point as the street runoff enters the system, the water treatment plants are overwhelmed and raw sewage enters the river. The current preferred approach is to manage the storm runoff using various techniques that store the water for slow submission to the system or use various techniques to get it into the ground. The alternative is a massive multi-billion dollar project to create a huge storm runoff system. A question I had was, since the home sewage is such low volume, why not retrofit the current sewer system that is large enough to handle street runoff with an internal closed "pipe". Just another perspective that System Engineering might be able to address.

In all fairness the presenter was very "system thinking" oriented. Many of the words during the presentation suggested that big "system engineering" may be part of the organization. But I am an outsider and I am not sure if the organization is 3 people or 3000 people doing "System Engineering" on this major piece of really cool infrastructure.

2008 Collingswood Book Festival

Yesterday I attended the Collingswood Book Festival as an author. I did not know what to expect but I have to confess it was a very nice time. The location was beautiful. We were located outside the lawn of a church with a great tree and beautiful courtyard.

There were not as many people at this show as in previous years, but I had many people stop buy to ask about the book and eventually get my signature. The people fell into 3 categories: the retired, those in college or fresh out of college, and those in between.

I was completely surprised to see the retired stop by and tell me about their work experiences at SDC, RAND, Hughes on the west coast then RCA, NAFEC, and other places on the east coast. I did not expect this in a small town outside Philadelphia. We talked and they knew people that were my first managers and mentors on systems that my generation was supposed to replace. To my complete surprise and delight they immediately knew what the book was about and they could clearly see the connection to what they did in their time - System Engineering. There was no selling on my part at all; instead they started to educate me on the merits of the themes inherent in the title. This was totally shocking to me.

I was happy to see people in college and fresh out of college very interested in the book. Like the retired they were excited about the topic, but unlike the retired they did not understand it. They just felt it was something they needed to know. They intently listened to me talk about system engineering and why we need to practice it in this new century.

The in between age group were really disinterested in the book. They would walk by or quickly shift their gaze away from the table and the literature. Three people in this group actually stopped and they were a very hard sell. Yes I did eventually sell them a book but the level of effort was incredible. Two of them were city planners in the local county. The third was a person from the financial sector who was in the middle of the current mortgage crisis. He was obviously very upset at the current state of affairs. He said he tried to warn his peers but no one would listen to him. He said he even wrote a book on the topic. Using the miracle of the Internet and linkedin.com I actually verified that he did write a book for internal consumption at one of these companies. The book was written 2 years ago; they did not listen. In any case his final comment was that I was a very good salesman and he bought the book. Obviously the general theme of the book is something that he knows could have helped avert disaster in his industry.