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.
"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 quantities 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 municipal 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 spaces, for instance, with their carefully tended vegetation, would be one of the first things to suffer.