The Nation's River Part 4

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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 hors.e.m.e.n 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 k.n.o.b-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 It is strongly to be hoped that that recognition is never withdrawn.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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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.

This costly cycle, which frequently makes the general public pay both in tax money and the sacrifice of amenities to protect the investment of a relatively few who profit from the wrong kind of flood plain use--in plain words, makes the public subsidize their ventures--has established itself widely. In some places, of course, certain kinds of development can take place only on the flood plain, and planning for its structural protection may be amply warranted, with equitable cost-sharing. But the difference between this sort of flood plain use and the much more common, thoughtless, quick-profit type needs to be more widely recognized and established in policies at all levels of government. The subject has been much studied. In August 1966 the findings of a distinguished Task Force on Federal Flood Control Policy, which made detailed recommendations for injecting some sense into the situation, were submitted to the attention of Congress by President Johnson. At the same time, he issued Executive Order 11296 on the subject, directing all Federal executive agencies with influence in such matters to do everything possible to discourage uneconomic and unwarranted use of the nation's flood plains. This, of course, includes the present Potomac planning effort.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FLOOD PLAIN DELINEATION POTOMAC RIVER AT HANc.o.c.k, MD.]

At Petersburg, there is little question that the wisest approach to present and future flooding problems would be one that would seek to give reasonable protection to the development already on the flood plain but at the same time deter further construction unless it is floodproofed or houses activities that find a flood plain location so advantageous as to be well worth the risk. In currently available terms, this could be accomplished most feasibly and at the least net expenditure--though not, under present policy, as cheaply to the community itself as by the Royal Glen dam, and not without some notable changes in the town's landscape--by combining a levee system around present development with rigid zoning of the unoccupied part of the flood plain, or its acquisition as parkland.

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Another approach that may shortly be possible was suggested by the President's Task Force and is the subject of legislation proposed to Congress by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Under this legislation, owners of existing flood plain residences and small businesses would be given a chance to buy Federally subsidized insurance against flood damages at reduced rates, while new construction in flood hazard areas would be subject to rates based on the full true risk involved. After 1970, under this proposed legislation, such insurance could be sold only in areas with enforceable codes and ordinances or other measures for sound flood plain management. Such a program could go a long way toward eliminating casual and expensive flood plain clutter, if it were backed up by adjustments in other phases of Federal flood control policy that would similarly place a share of any protective costs where they belong, and hence give an additional strong nudge to citizens and local and state governments to bring the situation into balance.

At Washington, because a high proportion of the flood plain on both sh.o.r.es is in Federal ownership and the use it is put to is determined by Federal agencies, Executive Order 11296 has special relevance in forestalling future increases in the amount of flood damage. Existing damages in the whole urban area are estimated to average $1.4 million each year. The most damaging flood in the metropolis' history occurred in March of 1936, and if a flood of the same dimensions were to strike today, it would cause estimated damages of about $21 million.

These are not small figures, though if they are considered in the light of the area's population and extent and the total value of construction there, they seem less formidable. Obviously the threat of damages of this magnitude must be dealt with, but just as obviously as at Petersburg, the manner chosen for dealing with them should not be allowed to stimulate unwise flood plain construction that would lead to still greater longterm damages.

The Seneca reservoir as proposed in 1963 provided floodwater storage calculated to reduce metropolitan damages by 46 percent. This is a significant though not startling amount of reduction, and it const.i.tutes the most economical one-shot measure of protection that could be attained. However, if the construction of Seneca is precluded for the time being or for good, that measure is not available. Second-best, by Army calculations, would be a combination of several large multipurpose reservoirs on main tributaries farther upstream. But quite aside from other considerations of desirability, these could only be justified economically if a great part of their stored water were destined to furnish ma.s.sive flow augmentation to ease pollution in the upper estuary. As will be noted in the following chapter, recent studies have raised doubt that such augmentation would be likely to help the estuary nearly as much as had been thought and it is no longer being considered a primary tool for that purpose.

This leaves pa.s.sive devices and local protection works as the main available instruments for coping with floods at the metropolis. They will probably be most effective if applied in a carefully selected combination of means, with levees and other protective works installed where feasible and desirable, and backed up in other areas by zoning, flood warning systems, and good design including flood-proofing, elevated structures, and similar devices. Some of these principles of design are already being incorporated in new buildings and renewal projects, but the task of planning and locating such things as levees usefully on a flood plain containing a good part of "monumental Washington," the beauty of which is a national concern, is not going to be simple. A good program must be inst.i.tuted soon, and the extent of the Federal interest in the lands involved should considerably ease the job of coordination.

Interestingly, certain floods to which Washington is susceptible can be partially guarded against only by such approaches as the ones mentioned above, and not at all by upstream dams. One of them occurred in August of 1933, when a hurricane pushed the water in the estuary upstream and raised it to flood stage at the capital.

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III THE CLEANSING OF THE WATERS

Streams have always had to carry and digest wastes that enter them through drainage from the land. It is one of their functions in the scheme of things, and so well have they performed it through the millennia that human beings have been able to take it for granted.

Within limits that might be considered normal, the ability of running water to handle loads of waste is phenomenal, and in earlier times those normal limits were seldom exceeded, for even in populated areas the general lack of sanitary sewer systems kept the loads from being concentrated.

In civilized parts of the modern world, however, there are now so many people generating so many wastes of one kind and another, which often enter the streams at concentrated points, that the streams can no longer digest them without help. Too often, in the face of uncontrolled human increase and expansion, that help has either been denied them or has been weak and perfunctory. The result is plain enough now in the sorry mess of sick or dead or dying waters that we Americans have on our hands, the heritage of having kept on taking them for granted long after we had bred ourselves out of the right to do so.

As civilized rivers go, the Potomac is rather lucky. It is polluted, but many parts of it are not nearly as dirty as people are sometimes led into believing by a look at the summertime estuary at Washington. The fabled and scenic German Rhine, for instance, is much more degraded in its main flowing reaches than is the Potomac, and so are a majority of the other rivers in the northeastern United States and many elsewhere in the country. Industrialization on the Potomac and its tributaries has been spotty so far, and there are no really big cl.u.s.ters of population in the upper parts of the Basin. Furthermore, pollution here has already been given quite a lot of dedicated and expert attention and some rectification. Thus anyone who travels up and down the river and its tributaries finds many miles of pleasant flowing streams capable of sustaining fish and the other things that are supposed to live in and around water, and fit to soothe frayed nerves.

He will find a lot of grubby and unsoothing stretches too, extensive in places, and even in the pleasant streams troubles exist that are invisible to the eye. There is little to be complacent about, for threats are multiplying rather than fading, and some parts of the Potomac river system already need more than help; they need resurrection.

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The Basin has several standard sorts of pollution, often found in one combination or another. Chemical contamination occurs along the North Branch, in areas where pesticides and other economic poisons get into the stream system, and in spots and stretches where specific industrial wastes create local problems. There is much and widespread pollution through organic wastes--often sewage solids, but not always--whose breakdown by natural processes may demand so much oxygen that a stream has little or none left over to maintain aquatic life and "stay alive."

Sometimes a.s.sociated with organic wastes and sometimes entering the river system otherwise are dangerous bacteria, and also the so-called "nutrients"--dissolved fertilizing agents that can stimulate excessive growth of algae or weeds in the water to the detriment of other forms of life, often to such a degree that these plants' death and decay sets off a whole new cycle of oxygen demand. And there is sediment washed off the land, which clouds the water and settles out into a smothering cloak on the bottom, building up in quiet stretches into ugly and damaging mud banks and shoals.

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 n.o.bleman'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 and runoff water extract from bared coal strata and the mines' spoil heaps and carry down to the streamlet they feed.

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Such additions are frequent for the next 45 miles or so downstream, as the North Branch in its narrow valley swells into a mountain river with the water of brooks and creeks flowing off ridges pocked with coal mines old and new. The river and such tributaries sustain no aquatic life at all among the discolored stones in their channels.

This mine-derived pollution has been much studied but is still not well understood. Sulphuric acid is its most damaging component, but may be accompanied by iron salts and other substances also leached from materials in and around the vast coal beds of Appalachia. Some acid entered the streams there naturally, before men ever touched the coal, but it has increased to deadly proportions with widespread mining. It issues from both surface strip mines and the old-fashioned underground sort, though the latter furnish by far the most--an estimated 75 to 90 percent. The overall magnitude of the problem is indicated by the fact that the more than 60,000 square miles of the Appalachian region underlain by coal, including the Potomac fraction, contributes five to ten million tons of sulphuric acid annually to streams and rivers, a rate of production that is expected to continue for at least a thousand years.

At Westernport the North Branch enters more populated realms, and receives one of its latter big doses of acid from Georges Creek, which drains a devastated, economically depressed valley mined since very early days. This creek may be the single most unfortunate stream in the Potomac Basin, for the acc.u.mulation of raw wastes it brings down from the valley's communities is pickled rather than a.s.similated by its heavily acid water.

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In the 40 or 50 miles below that point, the North Branch acc.u.mulates great quant.i.ties of more usual kinds of pollution as it runs down a broadening valley past towns and industries that have grown up because of the conjunction of coal, timber, water, and railways--and in the old days water transport, for flatboats used to shoot the river at high water, and later the C. & O. Ca.n.a.l operated upriver as far as c.u.mberland. Treatment of wastes in this reach is spotty and mainly inadequate. Some industries and towns sluice them raw into the dark, sad water, and others give only perfunctory primary treatment; the city of c.u.mberland releases the equivalent of about 18,000 persons' body wastes each day as effluent, besides extra raw wastes whenever storm runoff overloads its combined storm and sanitary sewer system and causes it to overflow. Where major efforts have been made, as at the Upper Potomac River Commission's Westernport plant below the big Luke, Maryland, pulp and paper mill, the wastes are so voluminous and complex that some of them still have to be dumped, and the effluent from even highly efficient treatment further degrades the river.

Fortunately, the North Branch, acid above, deprived of oxygen and overenriched and septic below, is not typical of the flowing parts of the Potomac river system, but it stands as a good grim example of what pollution can mean, and as a foretaste of what may be expected to happen elsewhere in the Basin if it is not stopped soon. Mine acid is not a significant problem in any streams outside of that region, but untreated or inadequately treated wastes are badly blighting many streams and rivers or stretches of them. Some smaller watercourses, like historic Antietam Creek below Hagerstown, Maryland, have deteriorated under the influence of discharges from single or limited sources, while larger ones suffer from a c.u.mulative waste buildup in areas of concentrated population or industry. Some twenty miles of both industrial and munic.i.p.al pollution in the South River Branch of the Shenandoah's South Fork below Waynesboro, Virginia, have done much damage to that legended river for a good distance downstream, a situation that is worsening with the area's growth. On the North Fork of the Shenandoah similar effects have been wrought by heavy organic loads from poultry processing and other things. The list could be extended: aside from a few happy exceptions like the prized Cacapon, draining rugged, forested, thinly peopled hill country, nearly all the Basin's flowing streams of any size receive damaging loads of waste from towns and industries.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WATER TREATMENT STEPS

(1) River water enters here

(2) Water chlorinated

(3) Water settles. Heavy particles sink

(4) Water pumped to Pretreatment Building

(5) Various chemicals (chlorine, alum, lime, carbon) added. Chemicals and water stirred in rapid mixing basins

(6) Slow mixing to form "floc" (see Alum below)

(7) Water settles for 2-1/2 hours. "Floc" carries impurities to bottom

(8) Water filtered through 94 rapid sand beds