Swimming against the current

Symiya Taylor, a young woman from West Philadelphia, was keeping cool in the Wissahickon on June 24 when temperatures hit 100 degrees in parts of Philadelphia, the first such record in 13 years. A friend of Taylor’s from New Jersey had previously visited the creek’s infamous Devil’s Pool, a natural swimming hole created by the drainage of Cresheim Creek into the Wissahickon. Now, on the hottest day of the decade, he brought Taylor and two other friends to swim, jump from the large slabs of rock that ring the pool, and enjoy the outdoors.

They weren’t alone. Some 200 people gathered at the spot. A group of friends played dominoes on the rocky delta of the creeks’ confluence as smoke wafted from a grill. A man kept close eye on his three young boys wading nearby. Scores of people swam, and two dozen more waited their turn to cliff dive into the water.

“I like the thrill of it,” Taylor said after doing her first jump. “But I couldn’t feel the bottom and I was panicking on the first swim.”

Officially, swimming in the Wissahickon is prohibited by Parks & Recreation’s citywide swimming ban. The nonprofit Friends of the Wissahickon (FOW), which voluntarily maintains much of the park, notes that the ban is a city policy, not that of the organization. Nevertheless, FOW agrees swimming is hazardous and posts warnings on its website.

“The waterways in Wissahickon Valley Park are not designated swimming areas, so they are unsupervised, and that alone makes them hazardous places to swim,” said Sarah Marley, interim executive director of FOW. “But there are many other dangers when swimming in the Wissahickon Creek and Devil’s Pool. Strong currents can lead to drowning, submerged objects can cause severe injury, and poor water quality can result in skin infections and/or gastrointestinal distress.”

The dangers are not just theoretical. In June 2023, two visitors to the Wissahickon drowned less than three weeks apart: a 38-year-old man police say accidentally fell into Devil’s Pool and a 21-year-old man who experienced distress while swimming on a 94-degree day. A decade earlier, the Wissahickon made international news when a father jumped into the creek in an attempt to save his struggling 13-year-old son; both drowned.

Historically, drownings and injuries have occurred across all of the city’s waterways, not just the Wissahickon. In June 1952, The Inquirer reported, an 18-year-old lifeguard in the Pennypack described as an “expert swimmer” drowned in the rain-swollen creek. He and other lifeguards had rowed to a log they mistook for a body and were sucked over an 11-foot dam.

Less well documented are potential harms from illness contracted while swimming. Public health experts say it’s notoriously difficult to link something like a stomach bug to swallowing a pathogen while swimming. The sick person might not even realize the connection, let alone report it to authorities. But scientists are able to provide estimates through modeling. A 2024 study of the Wissahickon, Tacony, and Cobbs creeks led by Temple University researchers took samples from popular areas of the waterways and found risks ranging from about 1 to 37 illnesses for every 1,000 exposures, depending on the creek and activity.

Still, risk is relative — and even acceptable — under public health guidelines. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for example, recommends states set safety thresholds for freshwater recreation between 32 and 36 illnesses per 1,000 exposures. That raises the question of how far Philadelphia waterways are from such thresholds. The 2024 study, for example, found the risk of contracting an illness from pathogens while swimming in Devil’s Pool may be just 1 in 1,000. It used assessment methods that differed from those used by regulators, however, and noted that risks depend on variables such as recent precipitation.

This dynamic can be seen elsewhere across the city. In FDR Park’s lake, Discovery Pathways performed water testing in summer 2024 for E. coli, a harmful bacteria linked to sewage. They found that levels only exceeded the EPA’s guidelines for safe swimming one week out of 15.

Kroll says such data highlights a potential gap between the actual conditions of some of the city’s waterways and publicly held beliefs. Visitors to the Wissahickon often hear that the creek is downstream from several municipal wastewater treatment plants. This is true: A series of municipal sewage plants in Montgomery County release treated sewer water into creeks that feed the Wissahickon before it flows into Philadelphia. Calculations suggest that as much as half of the creek’s water may be attributed to these releases at certain times.

This does not make the creek inherently unsafe to swim in, however, as modern-day treatment plants effectively remove pathogens found in sewage before releasing treated water. Instead, dangerous pathogens found in the Wissahickon primarily come from sources such as feces from animals (and human visitors) that — along with pesticides, lawn fertilizers, and motor oil — wash into it during rainstorms.

But many Philadelphia waterways are polluted by the city’s aging combined sewer systems, which are designed to intentionally release raw sewage during rainstorms into waterways including the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, and Tacony-Frankford Creek. That causes pathogen levels to spike and can make the water undeniably hazardous even for fishing and kayaking in the days after a storm. A 2021 study of common recreational spots in the Delaware River and Cobbs and Tacony Creeks found that nearby combined sewer overflows increased the risk of contracting an illness by between 39% and 79%.

These risks to life and limb can also have repercussions. Nonprofits that oversee many of the city’s watershed parks note they can be held financially liable for accidents. In 2020, the Friends of Pennypack Park, a primary caretaker organization of that ribbon of green space in the Northeast for 40 years, disbanded after being sued twice in quick succession, once by the family of a girl injured by a falling tree branch and then by the family of a boy who drowned while fishing.

Joseph Syrnick, president of Schuylkill Banks, a nonprofit focused on waterfront recreation in Center City, said his group “gets sued more than you would think” by people who have claimed some form of harm after interacting with the water from the group’s dock near Walnut Street. He joined others in saying the dynamic can create a disincentive for waterfront caretakers to officially open their facilities for public recreation.

There are also questions of cost. The Philadelphia Water Department currently spends billions of dollars in an effort to decrease the volume of sewage overflows each year — a cost passed on to residents via a fee on their monthly water bills. Anderson says the department would likely need to spend much more to get all the city’s waterways to a swimmable standard.

Increasing access to the river would also mean spending money on new boat ramps, water patrols, and perhaps even lifeguards, in a city where Parks & Recreation already struggles to fully staff its 60-odd public swimming pools.

Still, water recreation advocates believe these challenges can be overcome by prioritizing and implementing creative solutions. Syrnick says something as simple as a locked gate on Schuylkill Banks’ dock helps provide legal cover if a person hops it and gets into an accident on the river.

“You don’t want to be paralyzed by fear of a lawsuit because then you’d do nothing,” Syrnick says. “But you need to make sure when you’re [facilitating access to water] you have best practices and have it secure.”

Kroll also acknowledges water recreation comes with risks but says boating safety can be taught just like bicycle safety, noting that of the 150,000 paddlers whom the Riverways nonprofit helped get on the city’s waters since 2017, not one has drowned.

She also said the health of the city’s waterways improved significantly since the 1972 passage of the federal Clean Water Act, which implemented new rules on pollution that drove vast improvements in water quality across the country, particularly near cities. She envisions a future where the legislation’s ultimate goal of “swimmable, fishable” rivers is fully realized in Philadelphia. After all, Paris just reopened the Seine to swimming for the first time in a century after a concerted cleanup effort.

“I tell people I’m 45 years old and my dream is to, before I’m too old, have beaches on the Delaware and the Schuylkill,” Kroll said. “If you’ve ever been to Chicago and you walk out of the city and go to the lake — that used to be really dirty, too. So, I think it’s doable.”

This is the third installment in a multi-part story collaboration between the Chestnut Hill Local, GRID Magazine, and Delaware Currents, produced with the support of the Philadelphia Journalism Collaborative, a coalition of more than 30 local newsrooms doing solutions reporting on things that affect daily life.