Vintage posters from a World War II era water conservation campaign
From 1924 until 1946, annual reports of the Philadelphia Water Department were not printed and published, as they were in the hundred-plus years before. Instead various documents recording the department’s activities were collected and inserted into a three-hole binder for each year. By the 1940s these binders had become very fat, stuffed with all sorts of photographs, reports, product brochures, and other material. In going through the 1942 binder a number of years ago I came across these four posters.
Published in the first year of the United States involvement in World War II, the posters were part of a water conservation campaign conducted in May and June 1942, as the Philadelphia region struggled to meet the additional demand posed by the war effort. The campaign also included newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, and other printed material.
The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about this effort on May 24, 1942:
“The five-county metropolitan Philadelphia area is menaced by a serious water shortage that only united civilian action can avert, Mayor Samuel declared yesterday in announcing the opening of an intensive water conservation campaign.
‘Don’t waste water. Use it wisely,’ he urged in a radio speech declaring that the water-filtration plants serving 90 percent of the people and plants in this five-county area now are approaching the peak of their capacity.“‘Water, here as everywhere,’ Mayor Samuel said, ‘is a manufactured product; the quantity available is limited by the size of the treatment plants.’ No expansion of these plants is possible now, he said, because of war priorities on materials and equipment. ‘To enable the water plants to meet the constantly increasing demands for more water from war industries, war housing and the thousands of new war workers … our normal requirements must be decreased and our use of water strictly limited for war and essential civilian needs and purposes.’ The Mayor said 500.000 pamphlets will be distributed by air raid wardens telling householders to turn off faucets tightly, to repair leaking fixtures promptly, to put away lawn and garden hoses “for the duration” and to develop “the habit of water-watchfulness.”
Then and now, much time and effort is put into providing Philadelphians with safe drinking water, from the raw water pumping stations to the filtration plants that clean up the river water to the distribution system that brings the treated water to hundreds of thousands of residential and commercial customers in the city and adjacent suburbs.
It’s a different world today, and there are different reasons to conserve water then those promoted on these posters. But their main message is timeless: we should all of us, all the time, try to “Use Water Wisely!”
