At both places there has been development of the flood plain, with the result that damages occur when the communities' respective rivers get out of their banks. In relation to its size—around 2000 people—Petersburg is subject to much heavier trouble of this sort than the metropolis. It sits near the head of the lovely narrow farming valley through which the main downstream South Branch flows, a few miles below the point where two principal forks of the river join after rushing out of the mountains. In June of 1949, a flood there claimed five lives around Petersburg and three at Moorefield downriver, where still another main fork comes in, and wrought major destruction through the neighborhood.
The 1963 Army Report calculated Petersburg's average annual flood damages at over $200,000, and advocated construction of a $30 million, multipurpose reservoir at Royal Glen just upstream from Petersburg, to do away with most of the damage and to permit further industrial development of the flood plain, as well as to provide a great deal of water for downstream use and for regional recreation. People and groups in the area with interests standing to benefit from the reservoir were naturally in favor of it. Under present Federal policy—which will be mentioned again—its flood-protective function would cost them nothing, whereas levees or other locally effective approaches would demand a good deal of local effort and outlay, besides disrupting the town's aspect and its relationship to the river.
Opposition developed also. The very name of Royal Glen suggests the scenic qualities of the country roundabout. As at Seneca, a dam here would flood out some country with unique scenic and recreational values, including the famous Smoke Hole Gorge down which the clean South Branch runs between steep mountains dotted with caves and flavored with the quiet simplicity of the life that isolated hill folk lived there up into modern times. It is a section much appreciated by whitewater canoeists and hikers and horsemen and others from that region and elsewhere, who care about rugged and unspoiled places. Despite its remoteness, the proposal that it be inundated aroused more vigorously hostile comment among conservationists and nature lovers in general than perhaps any other item in the Army program except Seneca. The State of West Virginia declared itself opposed to the project, and to date has maintained that position.
Again like Seneca, the Royal Glen site does have certain unique advantages for use as a reservoir. But, as at Seneca also, its functional virtues do not appear to be nearly so unique as those of the scenery and natural values whose obliteration would be a heavy part of the reservoir's price. In 1965, the immense scenic value of a large part of the country it would wipe out was recognized by its inclusion in the big Spruce Knob-Seneca Rocks National Recreation Area. It is strongly to be hoped that that recognition is never withdrawn.
The issue of scenic destruction at both Royal Glen and Seneca tends to obscure another set of even more basically relevant considerations having to do with the whole question of flood plain occupancy and use, the extent to which those who benefit from it should share the cost of such protection as may be necessary, and possible ways of reversing a present trend toward inexorably larger national flood damages each year despite ever larger and more expensive structural protective measures at public expense.
THE HYDROLOGIC CYCLE
It is a complex subject that can only be summarized here. What it amounts to is that America has strayed too far from the ancient hard-won wisdom of treating flood plains with respect. It has been lulled by the achievements of engineering, encouraged by a general absence of inadequacy of State and local planning that takes such matters into account, and conditioned to a set of Federal laws and policies piece-built over a long period of time, with consequent inequities, imbalances, and loopholes that tend to emphasize structural protection at Federal expense for indiscriminate flood plain development. The result has been a neglect of the possibilities of flood plain management, which undoubtedly in the long run—as in the long past—will prove to be the most valuable tool for reducing these damages, for it will bring about a restriction on ill-advised and uneconomic encroachment in these streamside areas.
The reason most such encroachment is bad, with or without a dam upstream, with or without levees, is that it establishes the certainty of further and larger flood damages in the future, with the certainty of further and larger expenditures to combat them. It has been pointed out that no such thing really exists as flood control, but only a given degree of flood protection. Economics and technology dictate that reservoir capacities devoted to the storage of flood water, for example, be considerably smaller than the maximum runoff conceivably possible. This means that sooner or later there is going to be a great flood against which the reservoir or reservoirs will not suffice. If the reservoirs' presence, as is most often the case, has directly encouraged a lot of flood plain speculation and construction downstream, then the great flood is going to do more damage than was ever done before, and more reservoirs and other protective measures, most often Federally financed, are going to be demanded, at a price that rises sharply as less desirable sites and methods have to be employed, and with frequently catastrophic scenic effects. These considerations apply to small watersheds as well as large ones.