The Nation\'s River

U >> United States Department of the Interior >> The Nation\'s River

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

In response, the Secretary shaped a Federal Interdepartmental Task Force
under Interior direction, in whose specialized sub-task forces were
enlisted the skills available in the Corps of Engineers, the Department
of Agriculture, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (where
the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration was then located),
and the various concerned bureaus and services of the Interior
Department itself. Shortly after this, Secretary Udall met with the
governors of the four Basin States and the commissioners of the District
of Columbia to ensure that State and local interests would have a hand
in the planning process. Out of this came the Potomac River Basin
Advisory Committee, composed of State and District representatives,
which has conferred often with the Interdepartmental Task Force on
overall questions and has assumed prime responsibility in studying the
central problem of creating a planning and administrative body to handle
Potomac water and related land problems hereafter.

In addition, a blue-ribbon panel of distinguished planners and
specialists, assembled by the former president of the American Institute
of Architects at Secretary Udall's request and subsequently known as the
Potomac Planning Task Force, undertook a separate study of Potomac
questions, both in general and with specific focus on the metropolis.
Their independent report, The Potomac, was lately published. It makes a
detailed, wise, and instructive plea for considering the river and its
landscape as a whole and meaningful thing, for proceeding with their
development and protection according to high esthetic and ecological
principles, and for a distinctive form of management.

Existing private, public, and semipublic organizations with an interest
in the Potomac or in the type of problems it presents have joined in the
present effort by sponsoring public meetings and publishing discussions
or otherwise doing their part to help. Among them may be mentioned
INCOPOT, the Conservation Foundation, the Metropolitan Washington
Council of Government, Resources for the Future, Inc., the League of
Women Voters, the Potomac Basin Center, the National Parks Association,
and a number of local planning or action bodies. Through these meetings
and other media, public comment on the Federal Task Force's work has
been voluminous and often helpful, particularly since the publication of
its _Interim Report_ in January of 1966, which made certain proposals
for immediate action to begin providing for short-term metropolitan
water needs, to protect specific scenic treasures, and to get moving on
the long task of cleaning up the river.

With so many viewpoints somehow included in the planning process,
opinions have often diverged as to how much of what ought to be done
about the Potomac, and how soon, and in what order. Well they may
diverge. In a time of economic expansion and population growth
unparalleled in human history, predictions about the economy and the
population of the distant future--necessary to full planning--verge
perilously near to crystal gazing even when the best available
yardsticks are applied. And this is only one uncertainty. Among the
others which will be examined later in this report are the prospect of
drastic technological change that may soon offer cheaper, more
effective, and less disruptive ways of dealing with environmental
problems including water; the doubtfulness of sufficient public money
for large conservation projects in a time of international tensions and
urban crisis; and the solid American political complexity of the
boundary-laced Potomac Basin, which bristles with various forms of veto
power and a multiplicity of assorted regional, professional, and
philosophical viewpoints.

Such complexities and uncertainties have a powerful reality and
relevance for planners. They impose a need for breadth of view, for
leaving many future options open, and by the same token they present a
danger of piecemeal action, excessive compromise and indecisiveness.

The body of this report is an Interior Department document, couched
wherever possible in untechnical language in the hope that it may find a
wide lay readership. Necessary technical supporting material mainly has
been or will be made available in separate form. The report examines
environmental problems in the Potomac Basin and possible solutions for
them. Its underlying emphasis is ecological, based in a conviction that
man's own good is heavily dependent on the good of the earth in all its
complexity. No one at this point in time, obviously, is going to be able
to reconstitute the primeval Paleolithic world, nor would many people
want to. The earth has changed with people in their long surge toward
dominion over its ways and its creatures. But there is a difference
between adaptive change and the degeneration that modern times are
forcing on the earth men have always known. Growing millions of people
are coming to consider that human beings' right to see and know woods
and plains and mountains and streams and coasts in a cleanly and decent
condition--whether primitive or adapted in one way or another to man's
use--together with the communities of wild creatures that belong there,
is quite as practical and urgent as their right to usable tap water or
to a share in the Gross National Product. For upon the retention of
these ancient realities future human sanity and wholeness may well
depend.

We who are responsible for this report believe that this point of view
is going to gain enough strength and political acceptance to become one
of the motive forces of this century. Already it has much power. Even
though many established attitudes, laws, and practices are still firmly
rooted in the old exploitative, often heroic urge to seize upon all
resources and put them to use at whatever ultimate cost, disgust over
pollution and the destruction of beautiful places is getting to be a
political factor to be reckoned with at all levels of government. So is
concern over man's lemminglike multiplication in numbers and the way
his technology and his expansionism are gobbling up things quiet and
graceful and eternal--things he needs. It seems certain that political
"muscle" and respectability for the legitimate conservationist viewpoint
is shaping up fast enough that it will be able to dissipate the worst
threats--the grabbing and the spoiling, the ignorance and the archaic
attitudes, the onward shove of brute technology for technology's own
sake rather than for man's--before they have forced mankind on into the
gray sterility of life that would be their ultimate effect.

And upon the emerging potency of this sound and urgent concern with the
way the natural world is being used up, we believe a flexible form of
planning can be based that will do away with the dilemma posed by the
complexities and uncertainties of the moment. With a minimum of
compromise, such planning will be able to identify and propose solutions
for immediate problems in places like the Potomac Basin, while moving
toward longrun solutions for other problems as those problems'
dimensions become clearer than at present, and as technology and
politics make better solutions feasible.

Solutions for pressing and immediate problems have to be in terms of
present possibilities--political, financial, and technological. Some
such immediate problems--of water supply, pollution control, and scenic
preservation--exist in the Potomac Basin and are analyzed in this
report, and presently feasible action is recommended for their
alleviation. A considerable part of the report is concerned with such
problems, with the range of possible solutions for them and with our
reasons for making specific recommendations.

These immediate solutions do not constitute what has been called a
"quick fix"--piecemeal, one-shot action to patch up things until another
crisis arises. As much as possible, they have been worked into the
picture of longterm Basin needs insofar as those needs can be discerned,
and it is intended that action against future problems shall be built
upon them. Furthermore, we have sought to maintain an ample view in
identifying long-term difficulties and indicating what should be aimed
for when it is essential to act against them.

But we have not shaped a rigidly complete, prescriptive plan identifying
exact measures for the cure of all present and future ills of the
Potomac Basin. For a variety of reasons, we have concluded that such a
rigid plan would not only be self-defeating in the long run, but that it
is actually undesirable. We are aware that this conclusion is going to
arouse criticism among those who during the past three years have
consistently demanded that we provide a total answer, for the purpose
either of unseating the governing principles of the 1963 plan or of
reinforcing and amplifying those principles. Nevertheless we are certain
that the conclusion is right.

[Illustration]

It would be right even if the development of new technology were the
only uncertainty confronting planners. Barring a complete breakdown in
the present impetus of research and discovery, radical change in the
technology of water supply and water quality control appears to be
extremely probable within the next few decades. Some of the best of the
emerging tools, there is reason to hope, may permit men to deal with
water problems in ways that are more harmonious with natural ways and
less structurally imposing than present methods. Possibly the present,
often essential reliance on large storage reservoirs, for instance, is
going to be modified, though how much the ultimate way of doing things
will have to combine old and new technologies is something that cannot
be guessed.

If it cannot yet be guessed, it cannot be incorporated in a rigid plan,
which has to deal in technological certainties--i.e. in present
technology--and must therefore impose that present technology on the
future, whether or not the future is going to need it. If we are right
in believing that from this generation on, people are going to be
increasingly jealous in the preservation of their natural heritage,
future Americans will not be likely to thank this generation for having
unnecessarily robbed them of choices as to how to handle the
streamwaters of a superb river basin like the Potomac's. Any more than
they would thank us for having done nothing at all and leaving them to
scramble for water, and filthy water at that. Quite simply, no one has
the right to do either of these things to them.

It is our belief that if genuinely conservationist values are
established as the ruling principles in a flexible, properly paced,
continuing planning process, there will be no need to fear that future
generations are going to be either stuck with large mistakes on our
part, or cursed with shortages, floods, and pollution. With this report
we hope to initiate such a process for the Potomac.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

II TOWARD A MORE USEFUL RIVER

If the Potomac has been much studied, it has nevertheless been subjected
to only meager "development" over the centuries of its service to
civilized men. Most past attempts to alter it significantly for man's
use have either failed or have not led to lasting results, though their
changing purposes over the years summarize, to a degree, America's
shifting attitudes toward the utility of flowing water. Early projects
under George Washington and others to assure the navigability of the
main river above the Fall Line, which they saw as an artery for eastward
and westward currents of trade, left only some quaint ruined locks and
flowing bypass canals around falls and rapids. The later C. & O. Canal,
which ran alongside the river and was replenished by its water above
occasional low dams, required over two decades of toil and death and
heavy expense to complete upriver to Cumberland, Maryland, which it
reached in 1850. There had been some public opposition to the project
and it was never a great success even after completion, for the railroad
era had begun and the Canal suffered periodic heavy damage from Potomac
floods, being finally abandoned to picturesque decay after a mighty
inundation in 1924.

Largely because of a stalemate between public and private power
advocates, the early 20th century heyday of small-scale hydroelectric
power development of rivers mainly missed the Potomac, though at one
time a power company acquired land at Great Falls in anticipation of
such development. Other modern water projects in the Basin have been
relatively modest or have run afoul of strong opposition. Therefore,
today a sprinkling of small channel power dams and water intake
structures, some levees and improved creek channels, and a few
unimposing reservoirs of various sizes and types high up on small
tributaries are the sum total of the development to which the Potomac
water resource has been lastingly subjected, if we disregard for the
moment its waste disposal function and the maintenance of navigation in
its estuary.

In general this is undoubtedly a fortunate thing, for the application of
modern technology to rivers in the past half-century of our national
growth has not always had happy results. "A river," Justice Holmes once
wrote, "is more than an amenity, it is a treasure." His feeling is
shared by thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people who live
along the Potomac and its tributaries or who go there to float down them
in bass time, to picnic and swim, to hunt, to dig into the region's
history, or just to listen to the purl of green water against the rough
stonework of a ruined bridge pier. Deteriorated though a few stretches
may presently be, these rivers are still treasures.

The lack of development also presents planners with a fairly clean slate
on which to write. In terms of water, few massive human mistakes
confront them except the pollution of the upper estuary and certain
other reaches like the afflicted North Branch. Therefore they can begin
more or less from scratch and can usually find various choices for
action against the water problems of the Basin--against pollution,
against flood damages, and against impending or existing shortages of
water for municipal and industrial use.

[Illustration]

Though for clarity in discussion we need to classify these various kinds
of problems separately, in practice they do not so neatly divide from
one another. Nor do they divide from the way the land in the Basin is
used or from the pleasure and fulfillment people find in the outdoors.
If a region's use of a stream's water is heavy in a dry August, for
instance, whatever pollution the stream gets below towns and factories
will be more concentrated and damaging than if the stream were flowing
well. Pollution itself can affect the utility of water as well as
people's enjoyment of it in a stream. A creek watershed that has been
ignorantly farmed or roughly assaulted with bulldozers for urban
development is an eyesore of erosive destruction, unproductive of crops,
wildlife, or poetic appreciation, and can cause both heavier stream
flooding in time of storm and lower flow in time of drought by the way
its disruption alters the normal behavior of rainwater. The silt that
storms wash off of it is not only a major ugly pollutant of flowing
water below that point but can complicate flooding and bank-cutting and
navigation and other things by settling out into bars and shoals in
still stretches, including reservoirs.

All of these things, and others as well, have to be considered together
as parts of a whole problem. And that problem is that men's hugely
increasing numbers and their multiplying technological power over their
environment have made it necessary to readjust the balances somewhat in
great natural units like river basins--to restore, manage, and protect
them in such a way as to be able to hand them over decent and whole and
useful to the people who come after.

Problems of Water Supply in the Potomac Basin

Wisely handled, the water that runs annually through the streams of the
Potomac river system can be counted on to satisfy any demands that
people there are likely to make on it in present times or during the
foreseeable future. More than 2-1/2 trillion gallons of fresh water
normally flow down the Potomac in a year. It would be pleasant to
believe that this means that the natural and unassisted river system is
going to continue to serve human needs in the future as it has served
them heretofore--that after cleaning up the network of streams and
ensuring against their repollution and the desecration of their
landscape, men will be able to leave them respectfully alone to run down
toward the Chesapeake Bay as they have run during and before human
memory.

However, it is not so. Whatever human population might be considered
ecologically tolerable under natural conditions for the nine million or
so acres of earth, rocks, vegetation, and water that make up the Basin,
it has long since been exceeded by hundreds on hundreds of thousands.
And if those who predict such things are right, it is going to be
exceeded much further in the near and middle future. Today's
approximately 3.5 million Basin inhabitants are expected to double by
the turn of the century, with accompanying complex shifts in the ways
they will be making their livings and in the numbers of them who will
live in the country as compared with the cities and towns. Thereafter,
further geometric increases are contemplated, calmly by some
contemplators and less so by others.

As a result of past and present populations and their activities,
conditions in the Basin--including the river system--are necessarily
far from natural, for specific structural development is not the only
form of change. The Potomac environment has been adapted to man's use,
and in places where that use has been unreasonable it is already in
trouble. Clearly it is going to have to be manipulated artificially to
some extent to meet people's demands on it and to guard it against the
worst effects of their numbers. In fact, very luckily, it already is
being so manipulated in dozens of ways ranging from methods of farming
and forest management to sewage treatment. It is possible to hope that
present population forecasts may somehow find less than ample
fulfillment, but it is not possible to count on it for planning
purposes. Nor is it possible to wish out of existence situations already
serious.

[Illustration: WATER SUPPLY POTOMAC RIVER, WASH. D.C.]

At times during the hot months of drouthy 1966, the climax of a dry
cycle that had begun to develop five years earlier, the Washington
metropolis was not too far from the bottom of its water barrel. The
situation was not as bad as in some other Northeastern regions, nor as
bad as some local analyses claimed, but it was bad enough. The highest
daily withdrawal of the year was on June 26, when the metropolitan water
intakes in the Potomac sucked out approximately 380 million gallons. Of
this some 30 million gallons had to do with a pumping pattern pertinent
to adjustments within the system, and the other 350 million went for the
use and refreshment of a metropolis afflicted by summer's heat. The
total figure represented less than half of the river's flow at that
time.

[Illustration: GROUND WATER LEVELS WASHINGTON, D.C. AREA]

For a couple of days in September, however, the Potomac's flow reached
an all-time low of about 390 million gallons a day. Even if the demand
on those days had risen as high as in June, which it did not, there
would still have been an excess, but not a very safe one. Heavy storms
shortly thereafter eased the situation, and rainfall since then has
definitely broken the long drought pattern, returning stream and
groundwater levels to normal.

The sober fact is that the Washington metropolis is nearing the point
where its traditional main dependence on the Potomac's free and
fluctuating flow for water supply--with supplementary quantities from
Occoquan Creek, the Patuxent, and a few wells--is not going to work
during prolonged dry periods. Total flow even in a drought year remains
impressive, but dependable daily flow--which is what counts for
supply--varies tremendously.

Other centers of population in the Basin are up against water supply
problems or are going to come up against them shortly. The towns and
industries along the North Branch, around Cumberland and upstream, are
strongly aware of a water need complicated by the deep-seated pollution
of their stream system and the scenic and economic disruption of their
watershed lands. Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, a handsome town in a
prosperous farming district of the northern Great Valley, is approaching
a critical point in the relationship between the water available to it
and its demands. Far south in the Valley, Augusta County, Virginia,
which contains the thriving towns of Staunton and Waynesboro, is
experiencing an upward surge of industrial development that seems
certain to continue and is going to call for a great deal more water
than can be counted on from present sources. Public awareness of this is
shown by the fact that county citizens voted in a referendum in November
of 1966 in favor of construction of a Federal reservoir at Verona near
Staunton on the Middle River, which had been strongly opposed when it
was presented as a part of the Army 1963 plan.

On the Monocacy in Maryland's Piedmont, the old agricultural center of
Frederick has begun to come under the changeful, expansive influence of
Megalopolis as a result of easier access from both Baltimore and
Washington, and has been brought abruptly face to face with a looming
water shortage. Recent studies by the Maryland Department of Water
Resources indicate that the dependable flow of the Monocacy will not
serve the town for more than another seven or eight years even if the
flow needed to maintain adequate water quality is left out of account,
and the summers of 1965 and 1966 made even those figures seem slightly
optimistic. Both city and State have declared themselves in favor of an
upstream major reservoir at Sixes Bridge, also a 1963 proposal. And
elsewhere throughout the Basin, a good number of smaller places face
similar dilemmas.

Possible Answers

Except for acid mine drainage, most of the Basin's main problems are
found at metropolitan Washington. Because they are primarily people
problems and more people live there than anywhere else, the problems
tend to be bigger, including that of water supply. A conceivable
shortage of several tens of millions of gallons of water per day within
the near future is not a small shortage, and small measures are not
going to cope with it.

A number of possible measures have been considered and weighed. Some
seem undesirable for one reason or another, even in terms of the distant
future. Others are unusable now, but have promise for later, when more
is known, or technological processes involved have been perfected, or
cost have been brought within reason. Still others, undoubtedly, cannot
even yet be discerned. And some will work now at prices that can be
paid. Ultimately, it seems certain, the super-Metropolis of the future
will depend on a mix of sources for its water, getting part of it by one
means and part of it by another and so on, as technology makes new means
possible, and as economy, safety, and other factors may dictate.
Therefore, there is no single "right" answer for the long run, and an
attempt to prescribe one inflexibly would compound confusion over the
years and undoubtedly perpetrate an injustice on future citizens in ways
already mentioned. We need to do them the favor of believing that they
will be able to cope with their own immediate problems at least as well
as we can do it for them, and probably in ways better suited to their
tastes.

Nevertheless, it is imperative that the city be given a margin of
drought insurance for two decades or more, and for this margin some
source definitely feasible in present terms must be identified and
guaranteed.

Going outside the Basin for any significant part of the metropolitan
water supply does not appear to be justified. Some water is presently
being drawn from impoundments on the Patuxent just north of the city,
but no more of it can be counted on. Diversion from the voluminous
Susquehanna much farther north is feasible from an engineering
standpoint. But the cost of it would be relatively high, and there are
also certain strong objections in principle, based on the facts that the
Potomac does have plenty of water and there is no inherent moral
advantage in transferring the question of development elsewhere, that
the Susquehanna Basin may well need its own water at some future time,
and that the ecological effects of such diversion on the immensely
valuable fisheries of Chesapeake Bay, which are dependent in large part
on a shifting balance of salinities maintained by the tributary rivers,
are unclear.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15