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The Philadelphia Water Department (recently rebranded as Philadelphia Water) provides integrated potable water, wastewater, and stormwater services for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and some communities in Bucks, Delaware and Montgomery counties. 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.〔http://www.phila.gov/water/aboutus/Pages/AboutPhiladelphiaWater.aspx〕 It faces many challenges in meeting the goal of providing safe drinking water, including agricultural, mining, and drilling runoff, chemicals and fuel spilled on streets, radionuclides, and the treated wastewater from the region's inhabitants. ==History== The Philadelphia Water Department has been providing water to citizens since 1801, when, in the aftermath of a series of devastating yellow fever epidemics that killed thousands of people, the City decided a source of water was needed to cleanse the streets, fight fires, and perform household chores. While a number of private water companies had been established in other cities by that time, Philadelphia, with its city-owned and financed system, was one of the first in the U.S. to take on water supply as a municipal responsibility. Water was piped throughout the city, with paying customers served by direct lines to businesses and houses, and free water provided through public hydrants to anyone with a bucket to carry it in.〔 The city's first system, with a steam engine at Centre Square (the current location of City Hall) and a second engine at the foot of Chestnut Street, drew water from the Schuylkill River. This system was plagued by high costs and technical problems, mostly related the unreliability of the steam engines. In 1815, a new works at Fairmount〔http://www.phila.gov/water/educationoutreach/Documents/PWD_History.pdf〕 was opened. Steam engines pumped water up to reservoirs on top of the hill (which was the largest hill close to the city, and the current location of the Philadelphia Museum of Art). While the steam engines at the Fairmount Water Works were better-designed than those at Centre Square, they were still balky and costly to run, leading to a plan to use water power to pump water into the reservoirs. This was accomplished in 1821, when a dam was completed across the Schuylkill River at Fairmount. The dam diverted water to run water wheels to operate the pumps, resulting in a vast improvement in cost and efficiency over steam powered pumping, which was abandoned at Fairmount. Water-powered Jonval turbines were added to Fairmount between 1851 and 1871. By this time, several other pumping steam-powered stations were operating to serve various parts of the city, drawing water from the Schuylkill River, Delaware River, Monoshone Creek (serving the Germantown Water Works) and springs (supplying the Chestnut Hill Water Works).〔http://www.whyy.org/tv12/secrets/water.html〕 After the works at Fairmount were decommissioned in 1911, the buildings were retrofitted to house first an aquarium, and later a swimming pool. The restored complex, listed on the National Historic Register, now houses the educational and historical exhibits of the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center of the Philadelphia Water Department. The entire site, which also includes a restaurant and a restored historic landscape, is now part of Fairmount Park, and is administered by Philadelphia Parks and Recreation. The city and state passed various anti-pollution laws- beginning in 1828, and the city's purchase of land that became Fairmount Park was an attempt to protect the Schuylkill River watershed from pollution while creating a grand new park. Unfortunately, these and other attempts to prevent pollution of the rivers failed, and both the Delaware and Schuylkill became badly polluted. Combined sewers, carrying stormwater and sewage in the same pipe, emptied directly into the City's rivers and streams, and dumping of industrial wastes also went largely unchecked. As a result, waterborne diseases, in particular typhoid fever, killed tens of thousands and sickened hundreds of thousands in the period between the Civil War and the beginning of the 20th century.〔 To alleviate this public health disaster, five slow sand water filtration plants were constructed by the city between 1901 and 1912. Filtration, combined with chlorination of the water supply beginning in 1914, resulted in a dramatic decrease in the incidence of water-borne diseases. The Torresdale Filter Plant (now the Samuel S. Baxter Water Treatment Plant) and the Lardner's Point Pumping Station, which delivered filtered water into the city's vast network of distribution pipes, were both the largest of their kinds in the world at that time. Between the 1920s and 1940s, the coal-powered steam engines that pumped water in all plants except Fairmount were replaced by electric pumps. Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, slow sand filters were replaced by more efficient rapid sand filters.〔 Three water treatment plants – Baxter, in Northeast Philadelphia, Queen Lane, in East Falls, and Belmont, in West Philadelphia – now supply the city and surrounding suburban communities with water. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Philadelphia Water Department」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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