Proposed Water Resource Development
North Mountain
Town Creek
| 1. Sixes Bridge |
| 2. Sideling Hill |
| 3. Town Creek |
| 4. Little Cacapon |
| 5. North Mountain |
| 6. Verona (Staunton) |
The Potomac Basin, in other words, is still generally a wholesome place two-thirds of the way through the 20th century. If it gets the protection it deserves, and is developed thoughtfully and decently to meet men's demands upon its resources, it can stay a wholesome place into the indefinite future.
Water pollution was the first Basinwide problem to make itself thoroughly evident, and the need to deal with it led to the first Basinwide activities besides studies. Soil conservation practices for sediment control were instituted in the 1930's, and in 1940 the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin, often called INCOPOT, was formed by compact among the four Basin States and the District of Columbia, with the formal permission of Congress. INCOPOT's powers are only advisory in relation to State and community action against pollution, and it has never been generously financed. But during the quarter-century of its existence it has developed a wise combination of investigation, persuasion, and public education to fight this problem, with the result that on the Potomac conditions have in some ways actually improved during a period of wars and booms and haphazard urban expansion when many other rivers were headed straight down to stinking corruption.
In 1956 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was directed by Congress to undertake a Basinwide study to develop a plan for flood control and the conservation of water resources and related land resources. The emphasis in this assignment was upon a full long-term functional solution for the Basin's water problems in feasible economic and technological terms. In carrying it out, the Army enlisted the aid of other Federal agencies, and their Potomac River Basin Report, published in nine volumes in 1963, presented the study's results and a plan for Basin water development to meet needs to the year 2010. It is a monumental piece of work to which anyone concerned with the Basin henceforth will have to refer, because of the completeness with which it examines the Potomac water resource and the careful technical knowledge it brings to bear on Potomac problems.
However, the plan it presents—including recommendations for sixteen major multipurpose reservoirs on the Potomac and its tributaries—would bring about a massive and permanent revision of the free-flowing stream system and would inundate much valley land. It aroused articulate opposition at local, state, and Congressional levels, a good deal of which was focused on the key Seneca dam on the Potomac main stem just above Washington—an area where earlier single proposals for dams, first at Great Falls and then at River Bend, had provoked similar resistance.
Clearly enough, a powerful continuing body of opinion cares about something more than strictly functional values along the Potomac and in its Basin. It is a long-settled region, whose natives generally cherish what they have in the way of scenic and historic amenities. It is the part-time home of many influential lawmakers, who concern themselves about its beauty and well-being. And together with the national capital at the core of its metropolis, it is the vacation goal of millions of American tourists from elsewhere each year, who go home aware not only of monuments and marble halls of state but of crucial Civil War battlefields, dark mountain ridges overlooking classic river valleys, rolling Piedmont estates, and the wooded headlands of Virginia and Maryland that recede behind one another into haze as one looks down the estuary in summertime.
This national interest in the river was recognized publicly early in 1965 by President Johnson when, in connection with his noted "Message on Natural Beauty," he issued directives to Secretary Udall making him responsible for the preparation of a conservation plan for the Potomac. In addition to the tasks of cleaning up the river, assuring an adequate water supply for the decades ahead, and providing flood protection, the Secretary was instructed to protect the natural beauty of the river and its Basin and to plan for full recreational opportunities there for both natives and visitors. A stipulated aim, which seized the public imagination, was to make the Potomac a model of scenic and recreational values for the entire nation.
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.
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.
