April 27, 2006 Issue                                               

©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Groundbreaking project at Saylor turns marsh into wetland
by JENNIFER KATZ

Artist Peter Rockwell, youngest son of American iconoclast painter Norman Rockwell and graduate of Haverford College and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, created “Children at Play” for Saylor Grove in the 1970s.

A favorite frolicking destination for neighborhood children that became an unused eyesore, Saylor Grove, is now the site of a cutting-edge environmental experiment.

The three-acre parcel of Fairmount Park, just off Lincoln Drive at Wissahickon Avenue, is the first storm water-treatment wetland in the city. The Philadelphia Water Department has spent more than $550,000 and five years turning the abandoned marsh into a refurbished park and water-treatment system.

City officials plan a ceremony to dedicate the redesigned park at the end of May.

Designed to naturally treat storm water runoff from the adjacent streets, the wetland is expected to improve water quality and provide the water department with a basis to continue the project in other areas of the city.

“Wetlands are nature’s treatment system,” said Chris Crockett, manager of watershed protection for the department. “Saylor Grove is a demonstration project for us to see if the storm water-treatment wetland will yield the results we hope for.”

The wetland treats incoming storm water via a two-tiered process. The water enters the wetland through two 12-inch inlet pipes, flowing through cascading rocks. The rocks help slow the flow of the water and to settle out some of the heavier contaminants. The water then enters the wetland, a marsh of submerged aquatic vegetation and wildlife that further remove contaminants.

“The plants and wildlife act as a natural cleansing system by slowing the flow of the water and helping to settle out many of the contaminants,” Crockett said.

It is important to note that although a common perception is that a wetland contains stagnant water, the treatment wetland is engineered to keep the water moving, albeit at a slow pace, to avoid attracting mosquitoes.

“The wetland is designed to drain within 48 to 72 hours,” Crockett said. “The normal gestation for mosquito larvae is at least 72 hours or longer. Plus, the water in the wetland is not stagnant.”

Once discharged from the wetland, the water will enter the Monoshone Creek and eventually reach the Queen Lane reservoir, in East Falls.

The water department expects the project to have a trickle-down effect, providing cleaner water to the reservoir and decreasing the amount of treatment necessary to turn it into drinking water, Crockett said.

However, the project has drawn criticism from supporters of the Monoshone Creek. Both the Friends of the Monoshone Creek, an organization dedicated to improving the water quality of the creek, and the Monoshone Watershed Association, a similar albeit more mysterious group, have withheld their endorsements.

Michael Gross, coordinator for the Friends of the Monoshone, said that the membership remains divided and abstained from taking a position on the project.

Speaking only for himself, Gross said that he is disappointed with the water department and its choice to focus on this project rather than rid the Monoshone of its pollution.

“The water department is not taking enough action to stop sewage from getting into the Monoshone,” said Gross, of Mt. Airy. “Saylor Grove is irrelevant to the main source of pollution [in the Monoshone].”

He further stated that he was not happy with the communication from the water department.

Another member of the Friends, Maurice Sampson of Mt. Airy, said that among members, there is a degree of distrust of the water department.

“The concern is that this is going to change the environment and will not work,” Sampson said. “But I think this is going to be one of those exceptions.”

Sampson said that he finds the project valid, particularly after looking at another storm water treatment wetland designed by the same firm that designed the Saylor Grove project.

In 1999, TRC Omni Environmental of Princeton created a wetland at Strawbridge Lake in Moorestown, South Jersey, to redirect and treat storm water runoff before discharging it into the lake, TRC’s Jeremiah Bergstrom said.

But Gross was skeptical of the design firm as well. “I understand that the Delaware Valley Riverkeepers, a well-known environmental organization, recently denounced TRC, saying that they will not work with them any longer and that many of their wetlands have failed.”

However, Fred Stine, citizen action coordinator of Delaware RiverKeeper, an environmental stewardship group for the river, clarified his group’s position. “We have decided that we can no longer work with TRC Omni Environmental because of their recent work on behalf of developers,” Stine stated. “We felt that they went too far in justifying the development on behalf of their client.

“But the work that they have done with storm water infrastructure management projects, like the one in New Jersey, have been very successful. They have worked very well at improving water quality in those waterways.”

The water department has other detractors. Charles Parsons, president of the Monoshone Watershed Association, the membership and scope of which he refuses to make public, said that the department is doing more harm than good with the wetland project.

“The wetland project does nothing to help the Monoshone. It used to have a clean spring stream of water and now it will be a sewage-treatment site,” said Parsons, of Germantown. “The water department is not fixing the storm water problem but shunting sewage water into the grove.”

Crockett said that is simply not so. “We are not in the business of fixing one problem by creating another. … There is no sewage being intentionally diverted into Saylor Grove. We are only diverting storm water when it rains into the wetland.”

Marc Cammaratta, the environmental projects engineer for the department, concurred. “There is eight years of data on this water through the department’s defective lateral program [which seeks to identify cross connections between sanitary sewer drains and storm water drains] and the results all show that the quality of the water coming into Saylor Grove has the same properties of ground water [the base for measuring water pollution].”

Bergstrom, of TRC, agreed. “Prior to the wetland, storm water from the surrounding areas did not flow into Saylor Grove. It was directed into a stream from the 1890s buried beneath the grove. We built the diversion chamber to divert the first flush into the wetland and to divert the rest of the storm water during a storm event to bypass the wetland,” he said.

“The site is too small to treat all of the water during a storm event. After the first flush, any additional storm water has to be diverted to bypass the wetland in order to preserve it. If all of the storm water ran into the wetland it would destroy it.”

The first flush is the first 3/4 of an inch of runoff during a storm – considered to be the dirtiest, most contaminated water. The grove’s wetland is only .66 acres of the entire parcel, according to the water department.

As part of the project, the water department worked with the Fairmount Park Commission to refurbish the rest of the site as a community park. New walkways, a new bridge, new benches, new signage, improvements to the grassy knolls and new trees along the park’s Lincoln Drive side have been added.

Once again, it is the community park it was intended to be when dedicated to Harold D. Saylor, one of the first Fairmount Park commissioners. Saylor marked the occasion by saying, “I hope this grove will thrive and bring beauty into the lives of many men, women and children in the days to come.”