The Nation's River Part 2

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 a.n.a.lyzed 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 const.i.tute 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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 s.h.i.+fting att.i.tudes toward the utility of flowing water. Early projects under George Was.h.i.+ngton and others to a.s.sure 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 bypa.s.s ca.n.a.ls around falls and rapids. The later C. & O. Ca.n.a.l, 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 c.u.mberland, 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 Ca.n.a.l 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 ba.s.s 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 ma.s.sive 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 munic.i.p.al and industrial use.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Though for clarity in discussion we need to cla.s.sify 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 a.s.saulted 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 una.s.sisted 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 s.h.i.+fts 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 a.n.a.lyses 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GROUND WATER LEVELS WAs.h.i.+NGTON, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton metropolis is nearing the point where its traditional main dependence on the Potomac's free and fluctuating flow for water supply--with supplementary quant.i.ties 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 c.u.mberland 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton. 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 s.h.i.+fting balance of salinities maintained by the tributary rivers, are unclear.

"Planned scarcity" of water in a community, wherein administrators and public alike accept the certainty that during dry times lawns and parks and golf courses and sometimes human skins will have to do without the application of water for a spell, is a reality of life in some arid regions and is probably always going to be. Elsewhere it is, or should be, an element in the design planning of industries that use heavy quant.i.ties of water for cooling and such processes. All water supply planning must consider it, for to build against any conceivable shortage would be prohibitively expensive. Pricing of water so as to cut down on waste without curtailing ample legitimate use may well be a longrun tool, as has been suggested. But in terms of general munic.i.p.al and industrial water, any great degree of calculated shortage hardly seems appropriate for a humid-zone city which has a fine river at its doorstep and happens also to be the national capital, so that a scarcity would be of national concern in a number of ways. Federally established and maintained parks and open s.p.a.ces, for instance, with their carefully tended vegetation, would be one of the first things to suffer.

Desalting of sea water, another reality now in arid zones and one of immense importance, has a certain degree of planned scarcity built into it by way of its price, at least at present. Some people believe that in time this process will be refined to the point that it can furnish abundant cheap water to all the world's seacoast cities. Certainly as it develops it may well have a potential for marginal drought-proofing at Was.h.i.+ngton, an emergency source to be drawn upon if needed. But the day seems distant when it will be truly compet.i.tive in price with riverine sources in regions of adequate rainfall.

Inland arid regions and perhaps other places as well are undoubtedly going to find one answer to water shortages in the recirculation of their treated waste waters through munic.i.p.al systems. In one form or another such recirculation is already working at certain places in the United States on an emergency basis, and its full potential for industrial use has yet to be explored. However, the indications are that towns' and cities' reliance on it during anything but temporary emergency conditions is going to depend on expensive methods of refinement and "fail-safe" overdesign, plus dilution with new water, which means again that it will probably not be compet.i.tive in price with natural water where enough good natural water can be had. To this may be added the observation that the consuming public presently has a few definite lingering qualms about the idea involved, particularly if there is other water around.

The underground rocks and sands of the Basin hold huge reserves of water with a fundamental relations.h.i.+p to the whole river system, whose basic dependable sources lie in these aquifers' outflow to the surface. Around the metropolis, some ground water is being taken from wells even now to supplement the overall supply and to satisfy the whole demand of any number of outlying communities. Though locally available quant.i.ties are limited and pumping costs rather high, such wells will undoubtedly be highly useful for future extensions of the metropolis, especially into the Coastal Plain.

There is also much promise in studies of the Basin's aquifers being carried out by the U.S. Geological Survey to determine detailed patterns of their contribution of water to the stream system and to see if it can be regulated and made even more useful. Such a possibility has great implications in terms of augmenting river flows both for water quality control and water supply, and could mean much at Was.h.i.+ngton. So could certain techniques of deliberate drawdown of aquifers to induce recharge with excess surface waters or sometimes treated sewage effluent, also presently under study. Ground water as a source has some unique advantages--among them a minimum of evaporation loss, less need for surface structures, and protection against catastrophic contamination--and it deserves full exploration, though it cannot at present be counted on as a significant part of the answer for the metropolis.

Far out, though possibly not very far off in time, is the likelihood that future water planners will be able to count on some degree of control over a given region's rainfall and snow. Through experimentation, this subject is rapidly being excised from the mists of superst.i.tion that once surrounded it, and the Department of the Interior has an active program of research and study in the West, with tremendous implications. But, yet again, present planning cannot take it into account except in the sense that, along with some of the other technologies already mentioned and undoubtedly others that have not yet even emerged to view, it adds to the near certainty that future planners are going to have a much wider range of alternative methods at their disposal, to choose from and mix as may seem best. And this, in turn, reemphasizes the wisdom of flexibility in present planning and the need to keep big irreversible decisions to a minimum.

The upper Potomac estuary from Little Falls down to the vicinity of Marshall Hall and Mount Vernon or below contains a great deal of fresh water, an acc.u.mulation made up of inflows from the river above the Fall Line, local storm runoff and tributary flows, and treated sewage returned to the tidal river. The volume of this water that would be available for use without salinity has been variously estimated. At low tide, there would be 9 billion gallons of fresh water in the upper estuary from Chain Bridge to the mouth of the Anacostia River; In the 10 mile stretch from Chain Bridge to the District of Columbia's Blue Plains treatment plant, 15 billion gallons; and, from Chain Bridge to the salt.w.a.ter front near Indian Head, Maryland, 100 billion gallons. Most of the time now it is afflicted with heavy pollution, as will be detailed in the next chapter of this report. But it does const.i.tute a large natural reservoir of potentially usable munic.i.p.al and industrial water, whose attractiveness for these purposes, as well as for all others, will grow steadily as the pollution is brought under better and better control. These facts have led some opponents of any and all major reservoirs in the Basin to conclude that the water in the upper estuary is a presently satisfactory reserve with which to face any foreseeable metropolitan shortage of supply from the upper Potomac.

The a.s.sumption has strong appeal, but it appears to be too risky to serve as a basis for adequate present planning to meet looming demands.

That even now the water in the estuary's uppermost reaches, above the main metropolitan treatment-plant outfalls, would be usable for short emergencies by the installation of relatively simple pumping equipment below the falls, cannot be doubted. That in the long run the major part of the freshwater tidal river at and below Was.h.i.+ngton is likely to be a valuable source of metropolitan water, maybe a princ.i.p.al source, is quite possible. Its use is and will be a strong consideration in longterm planning--another good reason, in fact, for flexibility. But the truth is that right now enough doubt and ignorance exist in regard to its exact potentiality that it should not be counted on to provide a safe margin of supply under all conceivable conditions during the next twenty years or so, for which planning provisions need to be more rigid and definite.

The doubts and unknown factors have to do mainly with the quality of this water, which comes under discussion later. In abridged summary of relevant facts at this point, it may be observed that unless all sewage and sewage effluents were collected and diverted to points well beyond the limits of the upper estuary, use of its water for periods beyond a few days of emergency would become essentially a form of recirculation of waste waters--with, at this time, the main drawbacks that we noted in regard to that process and certain others besides. For, under the low-flow conditions that would bring about its use, the effluents in the river below the mouth of the Anacostia would penetrate upstream as water was pulled out below the falls and would reach the pumps in fairly short order, probably moving in a tongue up the main channel.