For almost a century and a half, the Philadelphia District of the United States Army Corps of Engineers has played a central role in the development and maintenance of navigable waterways, the management of water resources, and the construction of military facilities in the heart of the Northeast Corridor.
The Philadelphia District was established in 1866, but the Corps' local legacy dates back to Revolutionary times, when Army Engineers planned the encampment and defense of General Washington's colonial Army at Valley Forge. And it was 1829 when the Corps embarked on its first civil works project in this region: a quarter-mile-long stone breakwater near Delaware's Cape Henlopen that provided refuge from storms to the hundreds of ships entering and leaving the Delaware Bay.
Since the District's inception, its most prominent and enduring mission has been navigation. In 1919 the federal government purchased the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to be operated and maintained, and later expanded, by the Philadelphia District. The C & D today is a vital artery for the Port of Baltimore and is spanned by the District's five highway bridges, the largest such inventory in the Corps.
During World War II, the 100-plus-mile-long Delaware River federal navigation channel was deepened to its current authorized 40-foot depth between Philadelphia and the Atlantic; construction of a $300 million project to further deepen it to 45 feet is on target for 2017 completion. In total, the District is responsible for maintaining more than 500 miles of navigable waterways.
As a result, the Philadelphia District has always been closely identified with dredging. Once part of the District and still co-located in the Wanamaker Building, the Marine Design Center designs and delivers dredges, survey boats, work boats, barges and other floating plant for the Corps, the Army, and other federal agencies. Also based in Philadelphia is the McFarland, the only one of the Corps' four "minimum fleet" oceangoing dredges that serves the East Coast.
Since the 1990s, dredging has gained even more visibility as the primary means of replenishing dunes and beaches with sand to help protect New Jersey and Delaware coastal communities from storms. After the impact of Superstorm Sandy in October 2012, the Philadelphia District first responded to more than 60 FEMA mission assignments that included de-watering a major municipal waste treatment plant, converting former Army barracks to temporary housing, and filling a breach that had cut off the barrier island community of Mantoloking. The District then proceeded to fully restore all 12 of its existing beachfill projects by the end of 2013, while readying five more yet-unconstructed projects to get underway in 2014.
Long before dunes there were dams. After the back-to-back 1955 floods that claimed almost 100 lives, the Philadelphia District performed the first comprehensive river basin study in the entire United States. This was followed by construction of the five Corps-owned earthfill dams in eastern Pennsylvania that the District operates for flood risk reduction. These include Blue Marsh Lake, with its own Corps park ranger staff for recreation and natural resource management, and Francis E. Walter Dam, with a seasonal water release program that facilitates both rafting and fishing opportunities along the Lehigh River.
Since the early 1970s the District, like the Corps as a whole, has seen its workload become significantly and steadily greener. The scope of its regulatory jurisdiction came to include wetlands as well as waterways; its longstanding interagency support to EPA Region 2 has made the Philadelphia District number one Corps-wide in Superfund remediation; and the added Civil Works mission of aquatic ecosystem restoration has been applied to projects ranging from dam removal to fish ladders to a dune-and-beachfill system west of Cape May, New Jersey, that helps protect not only people and property, but also a freshwater wetland that constitutes a key stopover for migratory birds along the North Atlantic Flyway.
Finally, the District has a proud history of engineering and construction support to local military installations including Dover Air Force Base, Delaware; Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey; Tobyhanna Army Depot, Pennsylvania; and Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. Since 9/11 the Philadelphia District has become the Corps' preferred provider of global power contracting, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was recently designated as the Corps' microgrid center of expertise. The District owns or shares similar designations for its technical expertise in coastal planning, groundwater modeling, and bridge inspection.
Today as always, the Soldiers and Civilians of the Philadelphia District are honored to serve the people of this region, our entire nation, and around the world with the responsiveness and reliability for which they have long been known.