Over thousands of years, water has slowly created its own path – our rivers, creeks, streams, they all are a result of hundreds to thousands of years of erosion. Water has created canyons of massive beauty where millennia of rock formations are exposed and we can see the history of the earth. We can see where water flowed around obstacles more resistant to erosion to find an easier path.

The year 2025 also has shown us the power of water that does not flow peacefully over millennia but that comes in a single storm or multiple storms seemingly back-to-back. Building on prior years, including 2024 with Hurricane Helene that devastated Western North Carolina in a place that was thought to be safe from tropical storms, this spring and summer has brought as-yet uncounted amounts of damage and now hundreds of deaths.

This post is not to finger point, but to remind us all of the force of water and the need to be aware.

No one chooses to be stranded. Some may make an unwise decision to try to beat the water. What we all need to remember is the power of water. We need water to live, but we must respect her. We may need to quickly get out of her path.

There are many investigations around the world into the issues around flooding and how we can better reduce the risk and warn the people. Smart people will bring forward sound solutions that we can choose to (or not) invest in.

This month, too, we mourn those who were lost.

My borough is thinking about an annual development fee. We have water quality issues and we have flooding issues. Some people call it a rain tax and wonder why we are taxing the rain. We are not taxing the rain. We are assessing a fee for how much you disturbed the land and interrupted the water cycle. When this was Penn’s Woods, most rainfall was returned to the atmosphere via the trees. Then we cut down the trees to put in farms and houses. And then more houses. And then other buildings. We removed the trees – those organisms that pumped the rain back to the atmosphere.

Source: US EPA

We also paved over a lot of the land so we could drive on it or park our cars at work all day on it. We needed compacted soils for our buildings, but for simplicity, we just compacted the entire development area. Now we have removed the pumps, we have blocked the soil from receiving the moisture it used to get, and we wonder why we flood.

So, that’s not a rain tax. It’s you paying for the impact that you have on the land, on the floodwater generation, on the transport of pollutants such as your fertilizers and pesticides, the oil from your car, and, yes, even your dog poop.

Every year, your property and how it is developed impacts the water. To illustrate, here are two lots and houses on the same street and a quick calculation of impervious area (areas where water can’t seep back into the soil where it belongs). The house+garage in the red is approximately 3,000 square feet while the house+garage in the blue is 1,700 square feet, plus the house in red has a larger driveway and sidewalk.

Therefore, using the graph above, the 1,700 square foot house space (if the house wasn’t there and the soil was healthy), would generate approximately 53 gallons of runoff, but the house roof creates 1,000 gallons of runoff. The 3,000 square foot house space pre-development would generate 94 gallons of runoff and, after the house blocked the soil, would generate 1,770 gallons of runoff. Almost twice the size results in almost twice the runoff. Most importantly, covering up the soil results in almost 20 times more runoff than the undeveloped property. That runoff has to go somewhere and someone has to pay to keep the system maintained and periodically replaced. Your house, your choice of impact. That’s why most fees are based on impervious area, although it is easier to calculate it based on property value. Now, check to see if you can get a credit for being a good steward and improving what you can so you can keep the stormwater you generated on your own property and reduce flooding.

 

Modern times – the era of efficiency – always pushing for improving our way of life. But … it has resulted in a disconnect from the water cycle. We go into our houses and turn on a tap and we get a glass of refreshing water. Later, we flush our toilets and that wastewater magically is transported away from us. In a hard rain, the runoff passes over the grass and into the street until it finds an open grate and dumps into a pipe to go ‘who knows where’.

As our cities developed, drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater became three separate processes, often with three separate city managers. We broke the cycle of life by continuing what our recent ancestors taught us – bring water in and then once it is dirty or a nuisance, move it away as quickly as possible. We broke from the tradition of recycling water.

Now, as cities and regions experience water shortages and as treatment plants are overwhelmed due to population growth and aging infrastructure, innovators are thinking about restoring the balance. One Water. One Life.

(C) Copyright. Shirley Clark. 2019.

Wastewater and stormwater are no longer nuisances – they are opportunities waiting in the wings. Current uses for drinking water are evaluated to see which ones require potable water and which ones do not. Then, where we do not need potable water, these innovators propose replacing potable water with nonpotable water – either from treated wastewater or stormwater.

These opportunities come with nicknames, such as “purple pipes” that describe the pipe color that was originally used to designated systems carrying treated wastewater to outdoor irrigation uses such as golf courses or urban parks or even to houses to water their lawns. “Rainwater harvesting” to explain the process of reaping the rainwater on a roof and storing it for landscape irrigation or for toilet flushing.

Technologically, we can implement these opportunities. What we have to find in ourselves and in our communities is our will to treat water as the source of life – a precious resource. How to do this is the question?? How do we convince our neighbors that treated wastewater is safe for lawn irrigation or toilet flushing? How do we convince our building owners to capture rainwater from the roof and use it at their sites for irrigation or cooling towers or flushing toilets? What are our opportunities in older cities and older buildings?

Most importantly, how do we connect our children to the water so that they ask for what we did not – One Water, the fountain of life?

Middletown, PA, the oldest borough in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, at 250+ years old, nestles at the confluence of the Susquehanna River and the Swatara Creek: Morphing from indigenous settlements through a farming community through an industrial boom to now – a small town adjacent to the second-largest campus in the Penn State University system. Each new life has brought new water challenges with historical decisions affecting the present.

Historical maps (such as the Dauphin County 1862 map below) tell the story of the two streams that run through the borough. Water was the source of life and food and a workhorse to support industrialization.

Map #76 – Map of Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, 1862. A. Pomeroy Publisher, 517, 519 & 521 Minor Street, Philadelphia, 1862. Obtained from the Pennsylvania Historical Museum Commission. http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/bah/dam/mg/di/m011/Map0076Interface.html

 

But at some point, the water became a nuisance to the residents and the visible streams disappeared (below, 1911 Sanborn Fire Maps of Spruce (Duck) St with no visible streams). Streets and houses replaced the water and forced the water underground.

1911 Sanborn Fire Maps. Obtained from the Penn State University Libraries. https://digital.libraries.psu.edu/digital/collection/maps1/id/14224/rec/3

Underground streams throughout the watershed. Photograph by Brady Myers. Permission granted for use. Copyright by Brady Myers 2019.

 

Out of sight became out of mind, until 4.7 inches of rain fell in an hour in July 2017. The streams reminded us of their presence as they flowed above and below ground – filling the pipes and people’s yards and houses.

Stream above ground. Photograph of July 2017 flash flood.

What we thought we had tamed and buried laughed in our waterlogged faces. Now we know that we did not “win”. We did not tame Mother Nature. She won. She always wins. “Respect the water,” she whispers to us from the top of the floodwaters rushing by. Always respect the water.”

 

Yes, I know that this is not a water post, but this is the first anniversary of the passing of the husband of a great friend of mine. He was much too young when he, a non-smoker, was stricken with lung cancer and the world lost a great man. This post is to honor him and to help others find information on radon. The Department of Environmental Protection has some great ads recommending that people have their homes tested, but seriously, except for the Super Bowl, how many of us watch the ads?

We’ve known that increased radon concentrations have been associated with increased lung cancer rates in uranium miners. However, until 1984, we believed that the danger was primarily associated with miners and not with the general public. Stanley Watras, an engineer working on the Limerick Nuclear Power Station, tripped the radiation alarms at the power plant (some stories say as he entered the plant, others say as he leaves – I was in college and focused on studying so I don’t remember). None of his co-workers was tripping the alarms and no leaks were detected. Mr. Watras, however, was highly radioactive. So where did this come from? His house!

Mr. Watras’ house in Boyerstown, PA, sat on the Reading Prong, which contained radon-bearing rock and the radiation leaked into his home. Estimates are that he was exposed to the equivalent of 200,000 chest x-rays a year (YES, 200,000 chest X-rays PER YEAR). Uh-oh. At that point, the US EPA realized that this was a potential health problem to the general public. (https://spea.indiana.edu/magazine/Spring-2016/articles/barnes_stanley_radon.shtml)

You’re thinking – ok, that’s not great. Now what? You can check for the radon measurements in your town too. This won’t tell you what is in your house but it will tell you if there is something to have investigated. The main page for the PA DEP on radon is http://www.dep.pa.gov/Business/RadiationProtection/RadonDivision/Pages/default.aspx. And on this page, you can find a link at the bottom to the radon test data by zip code: http://www.dep.pa.gov/Business/RadiationProtection/RadonDivision/Monitoring/Pages/default.aspx.

As I said, I’m in the process of buying a house in Middletown and as part of the pre-closing inspections, I had a choice of adding radon testing to the proposed agreement. I had looked up the zip-code based data and found the following information.

 

The recommended level is less than 4 pCi/L. The first floor of the buildings tested were fine on average, although at least one result exceeded average. However, the basement average exceeds the recommended limit and my washer and dryer are in the basement and I’m thinking about finishing part of the basement in the next few years (hello, woman cave!). So yes, I want radon testing!

I don’t have any results to post because the seller didn’t want it done while they still owned the house (legal liability, if known). I did agree to that stipulation and my home inspector will return in January at the same price for the inspection as he would had it been done with the general house inspection a couple of weeks ago.

I’m not using a home test kit to do it because some of the test kits are not reliable and I want a professional evaluation. So we’ll do it in January when the ground is frozen and/or wet and most likely to trap the radon. It should give me a feel for the maximum radon in the house. And then I can sleep better knowing if I need to install a basement ventilation system for the radon.

Ced and Andee, this is for the two of you.

I’ve decided to be an adult and accept that I am in southcentral PA until retirement. So the next step of adulthood for me is buying a house. I had only a few criteria for my house: (1) Big enough for all my books but small enough to clean, (2) Within walking distance to work, and (3) Not in the Tropical Storm Lee flood area. I have been working with a great real-estate agent who tolerates all my engineering quirks, which means that I don’t waste her time going to houses that I know won’t work.

So what does Tropical Storm Lee have to do with all of this? First, if TS Lee can happen once in the 13 years I’ve lived here, then it could happen again. I have at least 15 years before retirement. We seem to have more extreme rain cycles over the last few years (more dry days followed by more intense storms). When I moved here, I could see across the street at work during a rain storm. Now there are southern gullywashers where, for a few minutes, all I can see is the rain. I see much more flash flooding where the gutters and inlets can’t keep up with the rain. TS Lee first had flashflooding (which easily could happen anywhere in any town) and then river flooding as the crest moved down the Swatara Creek. It is the river flooding I am avoiding.

I had gone back and forth on a house because it was on the border of the flood zone. One older map said no and one newer map said that a corner of the property may touch the flood zone (you can check your location in PA here: http://www.pafloodmaps.com/homeowners-tenants/Pages/default.aspx#.WCeKHWorLIU, then find the link part way down the page that says Flood Risk Application Tool). In the area of Middletown where I was house-hunting, here is the map. So as cute as some houses were, nope. Yes, you can buy a house in a floodplain. Yes you can build in a floodplain. However, even with the rules in place for special requirements to build in a floodplain, I think we are incredibly foolish to build new structures in areas that Mother Nature intended to use to soak up water into the ground, replenishing groundwater and hopefully keeping it out of the streams, which reduces flooding.

I looked at this map again and I realized that this map, which was in production during TS Lee, put TS Lee flooding levels in the 100-year to 500-year floodplain (a 100-year storm is one that has a 1% chance of happening in any year, while a 500-year storm has a 0.2% chance). Many areas that are slightly outside or on the edge of the the 500-year floodplain were flooded. I walked the town and I saw this (missed the peak of flooding because it occurred overnight).

Mill St. Flooding levels between 100-year and 500-year floodplain (Moose Lodge Parking, September 8, 2011 [left]; Mill St High Water Mark, September 9, 2011 (center); Mill St under water, September 9, 2011 [right])

Race St Flooding by Hoffer Park. Left: September 8, 2011; Right: September 9, 2011 (with a large increase in the inundated floodplain)

Left: Flooding behind houses on Emaus St.; Right: PA 230 at Swatara Creek bridge underwater.

A storm, that was not a 1% chance storm by definition, caused flooding that had between a 0.2 – 1% chance of occurring. And those aren’t odds I’m willing to live with, given the changes I’ve observed in the rainfall patterns. I’ll be in my new house, high and dry.

More to come on why TS Lee overwhelmed the drainage system in a slightly more technical, non-technical way soon!