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29 chapters
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR
October 1, 1968 Dear Mr. President The enclosed report, The Nation's River , is submitted in response to your February 8, 1965, request that we prepare a program for your consideration which would assure that the Potomac would serve as a model of scenic and recreation values for the entire country. This is the final report of your Potomac planning team. In my opinion, the study contributes significantly to a more complete understanding of both the opportunities and the problems of this magnifice
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OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY—WASHINGTON, D.C. 20240
OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY—WASHINGTON, D.C. 20240
October 1, 1968 Dear Mr. Secretary: Since early February 1965, when President Johnson asked you to develop a program which would make the Potomac "a model of scenic and recreation values", there has been a continuing joint effort to achieve this exciting objective. The Interdepartmental Task Force, which you and your fellow Cabinet officers established, has coordinated the Federal effort. When the four Basin State Governors and the Commissioner of the District of Columbia acted to establish the
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POTOMAC RIVER BASIN ADVISORY COMMITTEE
POTOMAC RIVER BASIN ADVISORY COMMITTEE
1025 VERMONT AVENUE, N.W., WASHINGTON, D.C. 20005 MARYLAND PENNSYLVANIA VIRGINIA WEST VIRGINIA DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA September 15, 1968 Dear Mr. Holum, The Potomac River Basin Advisory Committee was pleased to have the opportunity to review the recommendations compiled by the Federal Interdepartmental Task Force for inclusion in the forthcoming Report to the President. These recommendations represent the culmination of intensive studies in the areas of water supply and flood control, water qualit
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POTOMAC RIVER BASIN
POTOMAC RIVER BASIN
With good reason, people sometimes claim that the Potomac has been studied more often and more thoroughly than any other American stream. Its intimacy with the national capital at Washington and with great figures and events of our history have centered much American interest on it. In many ways it is a classic Eastern river, copious and scenic, that drains some 15,000 square miles of varied, historic, and often striking landscape, from the green mountains along the Allegheny Front to the sultry
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Proposed Water Resource Development
Proposed Water Resource Development
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
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II. TOWARD A MORE USEFUL RIVER
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 a
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Problems of Water Supply in the Potomac Basin
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 2½ 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—tha
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Possible Answers
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. So
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Flooding in the Basin
Flooding in the Basin
The subject of floods is fraught with more drama than that of water shortages, for a flood can be not only a hardship but a catastrophe. For this reason, accounts of floods tend sometimes toward exaggeration, and appeals and proposals for protection against flood threats often take on the highpitched tones of impending disaster. The subject badly needs sober public understanding, despite the fact that for decades a good many knowledgeable scientists and engineers and planners have been laying ou
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Troubles above the Fall Line
Troubles above the Fall Line
Pollution of the Potomac begins at or near its traditional source, the tiny Appalachian spring at the head of the North Branch where in 1746 Thomas Lord Fairfax's surveyors set an inscribed stone to mark the northwestern corner of that possessive nobleman's vast holdings. Abandoned strip coal mines lie within sight of the spot, and it is doubtful that the infant river trickles more than a few yards before receiving its first injection of the acidic mixture of substances that springs and seeps an
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The lower estuary
The lower estuary
Downriver from the main effects of the metropolitan complexities, the widening brackish and salt portions of the Potomac estuary form a generally healthy body of water, though changes loom as the metropolis moves inexorably outward from its center and as hitherto remote Tidewater areas are brought more and more under the influence of modern ways of being. Localized problems of pollution point to general dangers that will certainly materialize unless safeguards are set up in time, for estuaries a
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Techniques for cleaning up
Techniques for cleaning up
Two main general approaches to water quality improvement exist: treatment of pollution at its source or occasionally after it has entered a stream, and augmentation of the stream's flow to help it assimilate loads of waste beyond its natural capacity. A third possibility in certain situations is the diversion of wastes out of a stream's drainage entirely. In practice, these methods can be varied and combined in any number of ways to fit a need. To take the last one first, diversion of whole wast
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Machinery
Machinery
Though its spread-out economic benefits are almost incalculably great, good waste management unfortunately is seldom a money-making affair for those who sponsor it. Therefore, it is not usually so much the concern of private enterprise as of citizens in general and the various levels of government that look after the citizens' desires and wellbeing. It depends on laws to back it up, and on institutions and programs established by law. These are the only machinery by which it can be adequately st
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The Basin's amenities
The Basin's amenities
Of all the region's pleasant features, none exceeds the river system itself, for it ties the others together and shares and adds to their meanings. We have glanced at some of its "practical" aspects in preceding chapters, though even there intangibles came into consideration. It is the river's power to evoke human response and its relationship to the wholeness of the Basin landscape that most powerfully make it worth cleaning up, and also impose on planners a duty to make certain that their prop
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Troubles and threats
Troubles and threats
All these things, then, are a part of what the Potomac Basin has to offer in the way of environmental blessings. They form an endowment of national value and importance, and a detailed examination of them would take up more space than we can give them here, though some will come in for more discussion later in this report and others are examined in the corollary report of the Recreation and Landscape Sub-Task Force. Some of them are in trouble now, and nearly all are faced with trouble as bad or
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The metropolis
The metropolis
Washington and its environs have always been a cynosure for American eyes, a place people have wanted to be proud of and have fought to keep "right." Many of its defenders have been powers in the land, and for a long time in the past the battle was generally a winning one. Even aside from the city's planned monumental Federal center with its government buildings, memorials, formal parks, malls and avenues—largely traceable to the ideas of Pierre L'Enfant and the sporadic respect paid them by the
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Sprawl as a problem farther out
Sprawl as a problem farther out
Throughout the Basin where centers of population and industry are on the jump, sprawl is also gnawing away at the country side. Given our present pace of change, many Basin towns will soon become Basin cities, and around each, if they are left to grow in the rudimentary traditional patterns, the devastation that has taken place around Washington will reproduce itself. In many places it already has a good start. Some rural counties and small towns have developed a satellitic relationship to the l
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Industry in the landscape
Industry in the landscape
Another matter about which small com munities can seldom feel impartial is the prospect of attracting industry. With the growth of the great cities here and there, perhaps a majority of small towns are faced now with flagging agricultural prosperity, a lack of jobs, and the resultant departure—often reluctant—of most of their energetic young people for the new centers of action. The mere rumor that an industry is considering setting up a plant in such a place is likely to set off shock waves of
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Other Basin landscape problems
Other Basin landscape problems
New roads and highways, regardless of what traffic they carry and where they carry it, are too often planned and constructed as gashes of destruction across the landscape and across the "scenery of association," and frequently fertilize subsidiary ugliness in the form of billboards and commercial clutter. Attempts to mitigate the worst aspects of this have had some effect, but have not been widespread or strong enough to keep up with the growing numbers of cars and the growing demand for facilit
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Recreation
Recreation
Many of the things we have called amenities here are subject to full-fledged economic uses necessary to the region's wellbeing and not usually in great conflict with scenic and ecological values if they are carried out right. Farming and commercial fishing and logging used to be generally exploitative and hard on the natural scheme of things in this country, for instance, but they no longer need to be and in most cases are not. Using the Potomac's water for towns and factories and power and navi
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City recreational needs
City recreational needs
Recreation in and around the central city of Washington has to be a primary aim. The most people are in this area, many of them through poverty or habits of life not given to farflung pleasures but constrained to seek them where they live, or near at hand. The worst environmental threats are here as well, despite the foresight and pride that have saved much more open space and pleasant park land than most other American cities can show. The metropolitan river has to be cleaned up and made attrac
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Basin recreational needs
Basin recreational needs
If the things are done that need to be done to reverse the environmental deterioration that has been the subject of so much of this report, the public's chance to enjoy widespread, high quality outdoor recreation in the Potomac Basin will be tremendously increased. Recreation and preservation are not separable subjects. If a river is cleaned up and its shoreline protected against clutter and ugliness, its use by fishermen and boatmen and others will be enhanced. If a park is established to prote
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Avenues toward coping with landscape problems
Avenues toward coping with landscape problems
Most of the known basic techniques of landscape protection have already been discussed or touched on in this report: ways of cleaning up rivers and assuring their flow, ways of halting erosion and siltation, ways of planning land's use by concentrated human populations with as little loss as possible of amenities, ways of patching up old damage. Many of them are imperfect as yet and for some problems tools are still missing, nor are the existing techniques being applied in a completely coordinat
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Public attitudes toward environmental action
Public attitudes toward environmental action
One reason it is not certain is that the average person's set of attitudes toward the world around him is not totally determined by the circumstances of his life—by whether he is a city-dweller or a farmer or a small townsman, an engineer or a poet or a hardware salesman or a factory worker. Southern or Northern, black or white, poor or rich or pleasantly salaried. These things have great weight in coloring people's attitudes, but so do individual tastes and individual ways of interpreting the f
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Pecuniary matters
Pecuniary matters
Then there is money. Restoration and protection of the scheme of things and its adjustment to needful human use, on the scale we are considering in the Potomac Basin, is expensive, often involving many millions of dollars for action against only one phase of deterioration or threat or shortage. In accordance with the breadth of overall aims, much of this money must be Federal. Where benefits or responsibilities are clear, as in relation to sewage treatment plants and sources of water supply, sta
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The implications of complexity
The implications of complexity
These are not the only uncertainties and complexities that confront anyone who would act toward restoring and preserving the waters and landscapes of the Potomac and making them serve man, but some of the more specific and potent ones not dealt with ear lier in this report. Others have been discussed in former chapters or at least have received cursory mention. Among them are water technology's state of flux that offers a strong if hazily defined hope of being able to do things better and better
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The question of an agency
The question of an agency
If flexible coordinative planning's advantages for a place like the Potomac Basin are recognized, and it is accepted as the most reasonable and hopeful way to approach problems there, the question arises as to what kind of agency is best suited to carry it forward and to act on it. Besides certain unique agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority several types of institutions are available that can be oriented toward a whole interstate river basin. An interstate compact is a detailed agreement
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Action now
Action now
In the different chapters of this report, various things stand out that need to be started quickly, either to satisfy looming demands for water development and water quality control, or to restore or protect scenic, ecological, and recreational assets which, if not attended to quite soon, are going to either disappear or suffer irreparable damage. A few recommendations for action on certain of these immediate problems were made in our Interim Report of two years ago, together with recommendation
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AN ACTION PLAN
AN ACTION PLAN
I. Action aimed at coping with present and future water resource problems in the Potomac Basin as well as contributing strongly to scenic, ecological, and recreational values: A. An effective water pollution control program is the key to the public's use and enjoyment of the Basin's rivers and streams. Programs are currently under way which will result in continued progress toward enhancing the quality of these waters. The Secretary of the Interior has approved water quality standards for the in
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