Updates on Grid’s flood reporting in Camden, Venice Island, Eastwick and Northwest Philadelphia

In June 2021, Grid published a story on flooding in Camden’s Cramer Hill neighborhood, highlighting the disaster’s disparate impact on low-income communities of color.

Since Grid last checked in, Franco Montalto, an engineering professor and researcher at Drexel University, and his team completed an advanced model that can simulate a variety of different infrastructure updates and climate scenarios in Cramer Hill. “It’s a lot like Minecraft,” says Scott Schreiber, the executive director of Camden County Municipal Utilities Authority (CCMUA). “The area is broken into very small blocks and each one gets a darker shade of blue depending on how much it floods in a situation.”

The team recommended that the CCMUA build a nearly 6-foot-tall drainage pipe under Harrison Street, one of the worst-flooded places in Cramer Hill. Smaller tributary pipes would bring water from surrounding streets to a main pipe that would dump the water into the river. Read more. 

Photo by Kevin Smith