--- title: philadelphia drinks two rivers canonical_url: https://ensurance.app/guide/what-philadelphia-stands-on markdown_url: https://ensurance.app/guide/what-philadelphia-stands-on.md subtitle: the tide is already in one of them category: ecosystem-services --- # philadelphia drinks two rivers *the tide is already in one of them* Philadelphia drinks two rivers. If you filled a glass in the city this morning, the water was taken at one of three plants. Baxter takes the tidal Delaware, below the fall line, and Belmont and Queen Lane take the Schuylkill where the piedmont still meets the city. **Baxter**, on the Delaware, is the large intake. **Belmont** and **Queen Lane** take the Schuylkill. The department's 2025 transcript, reporting 2024 operations, lists Baxter at 144,330,000 gallons a day, Belmont at 47,140,000, and Queen Lane at 66,710,000. The total is 258,180,000 gallons a day. The same two rivers receive combined-sewer overflows when rain or snowmelt exceeds the interceptors. The glass and the overflow are one geography. The city is the door. The living system is the meeting. Piedmont water comes down the Schuylkill and the Wissahickon. The Delaware at the port is tidal. Farther southwest, Cobbs Creek and Darby Creek reach Eastwick, where a later tide can enter by a path a creek levee does not close. That meeting exists whether or not anyone buys a certificate. [Ensurance](/?from=guide) is how a named river gets funded. The rivers are the subject. :::johnson **philadelphia drinks two rivers. the tide is already in one of them.** The city is the door. The fall line, the tidal Delaware, the Schuylkill, and the creeks at Eastwick are the living system, whether or not anyone funds them. ::: ## where the glass comes from Stand at the Wissahickon and you are in piedmont woods inside the city. The upper Schuylkill in the city is that same upland. Follow the Delaware south to Packer Avenue and the water under the berth rises and falls. Philadelphia sits on that drop. Geologists call it the fall line. Residents meet it as two taps and a tide. The 2024 drinking-water quality report confirms which plant takes which river. It also records river temperature, both rivers, at about 34° to 91°F that year. The department does not treat for temperature. The number is a property of the water, a range you would feel if you put a hand in either river in January and again in August. Neighborhood heat, and the trees that cool a block, are a different file. They are written in [what financing urban heat island mitigation actually is](/guide/what-financing-urban-heat-island-mitigation-actually-is?from=guide). The department's own description of the supply shed is wider than this page. The watershed begins in New York State and extends 330 miles south to the mouth of Delaware Bay, and the Schuylkill is part of it. That sentence marks the shed. This series stays on the city where the shed becomes a tide, a port, and a combined sewer. New York's Catskill and Delaware reservoirs are upstream of Baxter. They are a different tap. This page does not reassess them. ## three counts of the same name "Philadelphia" is several official places, and they are not one population. | count | figure | what it is | |-------|--------|------------| | city | 1,574,281 | Census, 1 July 2025, vintage 2025 | | metropolitan area | 6,329,118 | Census via FRED, 1 July 2025, Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington | | covenant profile | 1,584,138 | Global Covenant of Mayors, as the page stood when these notes were taken | | city card | 1.6 million | C40, a 2023 projection, on 370 km², with a city GDP projection of $130.9 billion | The metropolitan figure includes Camden, Wilmington, and counties in four states. A sewer gallon or a flood count inside the city limit is a city figure. The $130.9 billion is a projection for the City of Philadelphia on the C40 card. It is the size of the economy they chose to print. Leave it on the city card. The mayor field on the covenant profile still says Jim Kenney. The C40 card names Cherelle Parker. The profile was not corrected in these notes. Both names stay dated to their pages. The Lenape are the people of this ground. A nation-to-nation file was not opened for this series. Nothing here is an ask toward a nation, and no instrument on this page is named in a Lenape word. ## what the city depends on The city depends on Baxter staying a drinking-water intake on a tidal river, and on Belmont and Queen Lane staying intakes on the Schuylkill. In a dry week that dependence is quiet. You turn the tap. In a wet week the same channels are the place the sewers discharge when the interceptors fill. The July 2023 letter from the water department, answering a public statement about sewage, is the document that puts numbers on that wet week. A typical year at the start of the program in 2011 was 13 billion gallons of combined-sewer overflow. The full count, and who already works it, is [who already works the philadelphia gallons](/guide/who-already-works-the-philadelphia-gallons?from=guide). The city also depends on the Schuylkill staying inside its banks on a day like 1 September 2021, and on Eastwick's creeks having somewhere to go that is not a living room. Those are later pages. They are the same meeting, read from the street. The rivers depend on the city in the other direction. Every gallon Baxter takes is a gallon of the tidal Delaware. Every gallon Belmont and Queen Lane take is a gallon of the Schuylkill. Every wet-weather overflow the interceptors cannot hold is a gallon returned to those rivers as sewage. The port's depth, the trail along the Schuylkill, and the houses between Cobbs and Darby all sit on water the city both drinks and discharges. The dependence runs both ways. A map that only shows "source water" misses the return. ## who stands on the same water Three publics meet this meeting every week, and they do not share a bill. The water department's ratepayers drink it and, through the consent order, pay to keep sewage out of it. The department is the city's water, wastewater, and stormwater utility, with wholesale contracts to neighboring municipalities. The city and the department are one government. This series does not invoice "the city" as a second buyer beside the department. The port stands on the tidal Delaware. In 2024 it handled 840,751 TEUs, and the ship that demonstrated the deepened channel was a 16,200-TEU vessel at Packer Avenue. That business, and why a container count is not a budget for the river, is [who depends on the rivers at philadelphia](/guide/who-depends-on-the-rivers-at-philadelphia?from=guide). Eastwick stands where Cobbs and Darby meet the later tide, west of the Schuylkill and north of the airport. Manayunk and the Schuylkill trail stand where a river flood already arrived. The separation of those waters is [three waters reach philadelphia](/guide/three-waters-reach-philadelphia?from=guide). An electric utility, PECO, distributes power across southeastern Pennsylvania, including this city. Its distribution revenue moves with the weather. That book belongs with the heat file linked above. These notes contain no PECO flood-loss dollar, so this page does not borrow the weather revenue and call it a river budget. ## a name for the rivers, when you want one The living parent for a river on this protocol is the [rivers and lakes agent](/rivers-lakes.ensurance?from=guide). Clean water, as a protocol-wide theme, is [clean water](/clean-water.ensurance?from=guide). A walk through other named places is [explore](/explore?from=guide). A Philadelphia coin is not minted. A city group under that name is not minted. Two river names can be started, later in this series, under the rivers-and-lakes agent that already exists: one for the tidal Delaware, one for the Schuylkill. A person reviews either name. The parent agent receives it. The city's older onchain place markers are not the route. ## frequently asked questions ### where does philadelphia get its drinking water? From the Delaware River at the Baxter plant, and from the Schuylkill River at Belmont and Queen Lane. In 2024 those three plants withdrew 258,180,000 gallons a day on average. Baxter was the largest share, 144,330,000 gallons a day. ### is the delaware tidal at philadelphia? Yes. At the port, and at the Eastwick edge, the Delaware is tidal. The Wissahickon and the upper Schuylkill in the city are piedmont. The fall line is that meeting. ### does this page cover the whole delaware river? No. The department's supply-shed sentence runs 330 miles, from New York State to Delaware Bay. This series is the city on the fall line: the two intakes, the overflows to both rivers, and Eastwick. Reservoirs above Baxter are a different tap. ### is there a philadelphia water certificate? Not as a live page. A line for the tidal Delaware, and a line for the Schuylkill, can be co-created under the rivers-and-lakes agent that already exists. The city's older onchain place markers are not the route. ## sources [Philadelphia Water Department, 2025 transcript response](https://www.phila.gov/media/20250529095434/2025-PWD-Transcript-Response-Final.pdf) — 2024 withdrawals at Baxter, Belmont, and Queen Lane. [Philadelphia Water Department, 2024 drinking water quality report](https://water.phila.gov/drops/2024-drinking-water-quality-report/) — which plant takes which river, and the 2024 temperature range. [Philadelphia Water Department, 20 July 2023](https://water.phila.gov/drops/pwd-response-to-penn-environment-sewage-statement-july-20/) — the combined-sewer program's starting gallons. The full reading is on the program page in this series. [U.S. Census Bureau, QuickFacts, Philadelphia city](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/philadelphiacitypennsylvania/PST045224) — city population, 1 July 2025. [FRED, PCWPOP](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/PCWPOP) — metropolitan population, 1 July 2025. [C40, Philadelphia](https://www.c40.org/cities/philadelphia/) — city-card population, area, and GDP projection. [Global Covenant of Mayors, Philadelphia](https://www.globalcovenantofmayors.org/cities/usa/united-states/philadelphia-pa/) — profile population and the mayor field as it stood. ## the series - [philadelphia drinks two rivers](/guide/what-philadelphia-stands-on?from=guide) - [who depends on the rivers at philadelphia](/guide/who-depends-on-the-rivers-at-philadelphia?from=guide) - [the schuylkill meets a tide](/guide/the-schuylkill-meets-a-tide?from=guide) - [three waters reach philadelphia](/guide/three-waters-reach-philadelphia?from=guide) - [who already works the philadelphia gallons](/guide/who-already-works-the-philadelphia-gallons?from=guide)