PHILADELPHIA—Karen Young stood in a cavernous room perched on the edge of the Schuylkill River that was once a public swimming pool.
Abandoned in 1972 after a hurricane, the old natatorium is part of the Fairmount Water Works, an interpretive center and event venue housed in a 200-year-old structure that powered Philadelphia’s municipal water system for almost a century. The room is trapped in time: The paint is peeling, rust crawls across the ceiling and the bleachers sit empty next to the pool’s drained basin.
As sunlight rippled off the river, dappling the mottled walls, Young thought about the night more than five years ago when another hurricane threatened the Water Works, a National Historic Landmark. The executive director of the Water Works since 2007, she’d confronted flooding before. But she had never seen anything like Hurricane Ida…