By Emily Davis
On March 17, a group of Sierra Club members had a private tour of the Water Works. Most of
our tour was spent learning the history and operation of the Waterworks, which was built by the
city to provide clean water to the citizens of Philadelphia. In 1799, Benjamin Latrobe said, “In
favor of the Schuylkill: The principal circumstance is the uncommon purity of its water” so when
our city fathers considered the construction of the Water Works in 1811 to bring water of the
Schuylkill to the neighborhoods of the growing city it made sense. Having been on several tours
of the facility, I knew much of the history but with each tour I always pick up a few pieces of
information I missed. One that resonated this time was a change in the source of power to pump
water from the Schuylkill to the reservoir that stood where the Art Museum now stands. The
first pumps were powered by “state of the art” steam engines powered by burning wood, but two
separate explosions made clear the danger of this method so the pumps were redesigned to be
powered by water. Part of the water stream was diverted to power the pumps while the rest was
pumped up to the reservoir. This ended up not only being safer, but it was also quieter, and
cheaper since the city no longer had to purchase 3650 cords of wood each year to stoke the
boilers. And this move to a sustainable power source happened almost more than 190 years ago!
New for me in this outing was a visit to the fresh water mussel hatchery - a project just getting
started. Did you know that fresh water mussels clean water? One mussel bed studied in
Southeast Pennsylvania was found to remove 26 metric tons of solids from the water in a single
summer season. Mussel beds also anchor the sand and silts at the bottom of the river. But here
is the problem, all the mussels in the remaining beds on the Delaware River are more than 30
years old . No young mussels! The mussels aren’t reproducing because they are missing their
fish partners. Female mussels release their microscopic larval offspring called glochidia which
stick on the gills of specific fish hosts - it doesn’t hurt the fish. The larva grow on the fish’s gills
and turn in to juvenile mussels - also microscopic. These just fall off the fish’s gills and, if
lucky, land in a suitable place to form a mussel bed. Anyway, those specific fish are no longer
available. So, to solve the problem, we have the world’s first city-owned mussel hatchery. It is
just getting started but the Philadelphia Water Department and Partnership for the Delaware
Estuary hope to begin repopulating the river from the offspring of the hatchery. There really
wasn’t much to see. There were tanks where we could see “mother” mussel and lots of white 5
gallon bucket said to hold the food for the mussels and the larval mussels. We were told that the
first microscopic clams raised here are now in containers in area ponds. When they grow bigger,
they’ll be released to a river. If everything goes well in this tiny hatchery, a larger “production”
hatchery will be built and perhaps once again the Delaware River will have young mussels. Here
are some links to videos of the project.
The Basic Project: https://vimeo.com/229717118
Growing Mussels: https://vimeo.com/229717618
Connecting the glochidia (larval mussel) with the Fish: https://vimeo.com/229717507
http://fairmountwaterworks.org/freshwater-mussel- hatchery/