The Nation's River Part 7

Obviously, just as in water supply, an ultimate cure for water quality ills is going to consist of a "mix" of solutions, different techniques being applied to the situations they are best suited to deal with, and combinations of them being worked out where combinations are what is indicated. Already the same kind of sophisticated mathematical models of given bodies of water--including the Potomac--that are being used to study solutions for water supply problems are being put to use on water quality as well, weighing the benefits and drawbacks of various combinations of means. And, just as in water supply, ultimate "hard"

technology is undoubtedly going to make better solutions possible, while a strong and meaningful start is possible with the technology that is on hand.

Silt is a truly Basinwide problem. The individual tiny grains of soil that ma.s.s to sully and choke the estuary may have originated anywhere in the thousands of square miles of drainage above. They const.i.tute an economic loss at their points of origin as well as a trouble all along their downstream course of migration.

The basic-physical ways of preventing silt are twofold and easily defined: first, the maintenance of proper land cover--vegetation or humus or mulch which blankets and anchors the soil particles and prevents falling or flowing water from dislodging them--and second, structural approaches that control the flow of water and can also serve to trap eroded material. These latter can be anything from good contour plowing practices to a major reservoir with a certain silt capacity built into it.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Such techniques are the basis of existing programs of the Soil Conservation Service and the Forest Service that have proved their effectiveness over many years of rural application. Watershed planning with small reservoirs, check dams, and terraces backed up by good land treatment and use, soil surveys, wise forestry practices, and such things are stimulated and bolstered in these programs by technical and financial a.s.sistance given to private landowners, States, and local organizations. They have already had important local effects in the Potomac States as throughout the country, but for maximum value in relieving sedimentation they are going to need much wider and more intensive application.

In modified form, they can be effective against newer and more concentrated sources of silt, while sometimes accomplishing other purposes as well. As we noted in discussing metropolitan pollution, urban land undergoing development can enormously benefit from good watershed planning. Preservation of critically erosive and flood-p.r.o.ne land in gra.s.s and forest, insistence on prompt re-vegetation of bared land and the use of such things as sediment detention basins by developers, the construction of small headwater reservoirs when they are needed to trap silt and reduce flooding--all these elements of watershed planning are effective not only against silt but against standard urban and suburban ugliness. The translation of rural techniques to city use cannot be literal, for both urban hydrology and urban land use are distinctive, and a good deal remains to be learned about making the techniques work better there. But their basic principles are obviously a main hope.

Other modifications of them, if put into wide practice, can cut down on the heavy production of silt by strip mines in the upper Basin; these involve both the reclamation of abandoned mines and the use of more care in sc.r.a.ping new ones. And application of the same principles--protective cover and detention of runoff--to new highway and road construction, as well as to the reclamation of banks and shoulders on old secondary roads, has to be achieved.

The silt already in the upper estuary, and likely to continue to be deposited there even after the best available controls may have been put into operation above, will need radical treatment. The tens of millions of tons already choking the metropolitan river, the stockpile of centuries, will have to be dredged out if the river is going to be as pleasant and useful at the capital as it ought to be, and so will the yearly additions that can inevitably be expected. This can be done if the money is available, though a considerable unsolved problem, under research at present, is where to put the silt after it has been taken out of the river, for appropriate fill sites are growing scarce.

Turbidity in the sluggish upper estuary will continue to be a problem too, for the fine particles of silt that cause it are the least affected by standard land treatment and sediment control measures.

Polyelectrolytes--chemicals which when applied in quite small amounts can coagulate such suspended silt and settle it out--offer some promise as tools against turbidity and are being tried out experimentally above one of the reservoirs on upper Rock Creek, with good results thus far.

Very possibly they may prove to be useful for clearing up the estuary after it has been roiled by storm runoff, and for achieving some control of murky waters around sand and gravel dredging operations.

However, ironically, it has also been pointed out that until the excess of nutrients in the upper estuary is eliminated, such clearing of the water could very possibly cause a great increase in the already disastrous algae blooms, by allowing sunlight to penetrate to greater depths and foster more production of this undelightful greenery. Cleanup of pollution as complex as that evolved in the 20th century has to be across the board.

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Barring a general philosophical revolution on the part of the American people, the problem of junk and debris in our waters is likely to continue and even to increase as people and their consumption of the products of the economy maintain their geometric growth. Clean rivers in themselves might deter a good many people from cluttering them thus, and so might public education, stiff fines, and the provision of better munic.i.p.al pickup and dumping facilities. But mainly getting rid of such detritus is probably going to be a matter of fairly continuous gathering and disposal. On navigable waters like those of the upper Potomac estuary, ingenious collection craft under the command of Army Engineers are in prospect; elsewhere the job is likely to be more old-fashioned and laborious.

For certain remaining pollution problems, no definite full technological answers exist at present and the main hope must be to alleviate them as much as possible while pressing a search for long-run answers. Some are relatively restricted in their effects in the Potomac Basin so far, though they have some drastic local effects and some long-run implications. Certain industrial wastes not amenable to any presently known form of treatment, such as tannery discharges at Petersburg, West Virginia, and Williamsport, Maryland, are one example. So are the noxious exudations of raw sewage and garbage from ships and pleasure craft. Marinas themselves and the boats docked there can and must be connected to waste collection systems. Laws can and should prohibit discharges from watercraft in harbors and rivers. But until better means of on-board waste treatment or retention than exist at present are evolved and made mandatory, the mult.i.tudes of boats with standard toilet facilities are going to keep on causing trouble.

Other sources of trouble without clear-cut present solutions are big ones. Surface runoff from both cities and rural areas, as we have seen, causes much pollution. In the country, soil conservation measures can slow it somewhat and strain out some pollutants, and augmentation of streams' flow can enhance their capacity to oxidize the wastes. But neither of these seem likely to do much to ease the longrun buildup and diffusion of persistent pollutants like pesticides, or to avert the possibility of disastrous spills. Public education and wiser restrictive legislation may help, but the only real hope in terms of these poisons appears to be that more selective and less indestructible subst.i.tutes will be found, and all promising means of biological pest control explored. Continuing programs are focused on the problem, but it continues to be serious.

Pollutive runoff from urban areas merges with the whole question of urban sewer systems, for most of it gets to the river through storm sewers. We have seen that the old-style combined sewers of the District of Columbia and Alexandria cause gross pollution when storms force open their overflow gates, and we have seen too why the approach to this problem that formerly prevailed--the arduous, hugely expensive digging up of sewers and their replacement with dual pipes to carry storm runoff and sewage separately--is no longer considered satisfactory. For the more modern dual systems also contribute much trouble through the filthy rainwater that pours out into streams from the storm system and through the accidental or illegal channeling of sanitary wastes into storm sewers.

A wholly satisfactory answer would allow runoff water as well as all sanitary wastes to be held for full treatment at a standard plant. But when we consider that at the Washington metropolis the dirty local runoff from a single storm may amount to billions of gallons, the question of where to hold it grows a bit complex, and is leading toward experimentation with such ideas as vast subterranean networks of tunnels for storage. Partial answers might come from subjecting storm and mixed flows to different and lesser kinds of treatment by micro-screens at sewer outfalls, detention and settling tanks, and filtration beds. These possibilities and others need much investigation and testing.

Then there are the mult.i.tude of nasty mysterious dribbles that help to degrade Rock Creek and can undoubtedly be found in even more profusion along every other metropolitan watercourse. Such of them as issue from storm sewers will be eliminated when a solution turns up for the problem of runoff water. The others, and they are numerous, will not. Even if the bureaucratic and political tangles that help to perpetuate them--which will be mentioned again--are dealt with, the sheer mathematics of possibility in a great city, plus the frequent difficulty of fixing responsibility, make the overall problem of these miscellaneous leaks and dribbles a very tough one, not likely to be resolved with the wave of anyone's hand. Except in visible and well-defended watercourses like Rock Creek, they will probably persist for a long while, even though in reduced quant.i.ties, together with some storm runoff and some periodic discharge from combined sewers, not a major component in estuarial pollution but a stubborn one.

A final great contaminant against which weapons are meager is acid mine drainage. Its sources along the North Branch are numerous, as we have seen. They have been and are being minutely studied, but present technology does not furnish any clear and effective means of dealing with each source individually and returning the upper river and its branches to health, and such source rectification would be the only really adequate answer.

Surface strip mines are deservedly notorious for the destruction of the rugged green landscapes that are one of Appalachia's greatest resources.

Because of the public disgust they arouse, they have had a lot of attention, and methods for conducting this sort of mining less brutally and for reclaiming old minesites have been worked out. These methods have notable effect on silt and acid production. Because State laws to regulate strip mining have been generally scarce and weak, however, and because the reclamation of old mines is very expensive, such action is mainly more honored in the breach than in the observance.

However, strip mines produce only a tenth to a quarter of acid mine pollution, and if they were all under control the problem would still be huge. The active or abandoned underground mines that give out the great bulk of the acid and other pollutive substances have so far almost totally resisted satisfactory management, despite tremendous efforts.

Among techniques that have been tried are neutralization with limestone and other materials, air sealing to cut down on the oxidation that helps form the acid, sealing of mine openings to prevent outflow, mining methods designed to prevent exposure of sulfuritic materials, and chemical inhibition of acid generation. Regardless of the hope that some have aroused, none has worked well and economically, and the search is hindered by a continuing lack of data and scientific knowledge concerning the complex physical and chemical processes by which the pollutants are formed.

A number of agencies are researching this whole problem, among them the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration, the Geological Survey, the Bureau of Mines, the Soil Conservation Service, INCOPOT, and some State government bodies. Sooner or later an answer or a set of answers must come out of these efforts. But nothing presently conduces to a belief that the acid problem on the North Branch or anywhere else is going to find quick and dramatic alleviation at its sources.

Dilution of this acid pollution helps to minimize its effects, not actually neutralizing them but reducing their severity in periods of low river flow. It can be accomplished by impounding mine drainage for release only during periods of high flow, though where sources are many as on the North Branch this would be difficult. Or fresh water can be held in bulk storage for release during low flow. In helping acid conditions along the lower North Branch, therefore, the authorized Bloomington reservoir may play a part, though it will do nothing for the upper reaches of the river and the reservoir water itself will be acidic if nothing is done to neutralize it. Under INCOPOT auspices, a promising inquiry is being conducted into the possibility of instream acid removal above the reservoir, using an energy process possibly powered by electricity generated at the dam. If it works out as well as seems probable, the benefits can be huge.

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There is little point, of course, in getting the acid out of the lower North Branch unless the other pollution in that area is dealt with too.

This compounded trouble, involving a considerable number of towns and industries with insufficient waste treatment or none at all, is made to order for a pilot application of the regional or sub-basin type of waste management authority mentioned earlier in this chapter. Not only is the problem on the North Branch bad enough to warrant special overall measures, but the area's topography is well suited to collection of wastes and their conveyance to first-rate centralized treatment plants.

This approach too is being studied out by INCOPOT, not only for the North Branch but for other well-adapted problem watersheds such as Antietam Creek. Like similar systems in Germany that have long been admired, it would pool the resources of all sub-basin waste producers, get appropriate government funding, and subject all the pollution of a given drainage area to intensive and comprehensive correction.

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 inst.i.tutions and programs established by law. These are the only machinery by which it can be adequately stimulated, unless we a.s.sume that all waste producers are altruistic to a point of self-sacrifice, an a.s.sumption which history does not encourage.

Thanks to thoroughly justified public anxiety over the state of American waters, there is presently on hand the best a.s.sortment of such legal machinery that has ever existed, much of it so new as to be mainly untested. The Key Federal item is the Water Quality Act of 1965, which established the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration and set into motion a national program to clean up interstate and tidal waters.

In the program the States were allotted primary responsibility for setting standards of cleanliness and were given until June 30, 1967, to work them out and submit them to the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration for review. Later came the Clean Waters Restoration Act of 1966, which authorized funds for F.W.P.C.A. construction grants to help communities build waste treatment facilities. Programs under other government agencies are also aimed at helping towns and cities deal with wastes.

In May of 1966 the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration was transferred from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to the Department of the Interior, with a good many changes in personnel. A valuable move toward the longrun unity of Federal environmental study and action, this change has meant that the agency's shakedown period in its new surroundings has come during the latter part of our Potomac work, and that some large questions of policy and procedure are only now being answered. Furthermore, the fact that our study has coincided with the inevitably lengthy shaping of the State standards, and with their review and their coordination on specific interstate streams like the Potomac and its main tributaries, has somewhat blurred our view of this most significant legal machinery of all. For it is through these standards and their enforcement that the fundamental action toward a clean Potomac will be taken. The emphasis in formulating them and reviewing them has been on vast improvement, not on a rationalization of existing conditions, and behind them there is going to be legal muscle for enforcement.

Erosion and sedimentation, particularly from urban and industrial sources, will be of concern in these State programs, and in fact some Basin States already have powers for use against them that have never been brought fully to bear, but undoubtedly will be with the new impetus. At the Federal level, going programs of the Department of Agriculture--primarily under the Soil Conservation Service but also involving the Forest Service--are the best machinery we have. Their techniques of soil protection and runoff detention have been described earlier, and are often applied in a coordinated way to whole small watersheds. Mainly they are put into practice through the voluntary cooperation of landowners, watershed a.s.sociations, and local or State governments, stimulated by Federal technical a.s.sistance and cost-sharing.

It was noted earlier that these techniques can also be effective against careless urban land shaping and other new concentrated sources of silt such as strip mines. But in terms of legal machinery, these areas present problems, chief among which is the matter of incentive on the part of those who must cooperate if the programs are to work. In an agricultural watershed, the effect of soil conservation practices and flood control measures on the health and productivity of the land is sharply evident to rural landowners and others in the neighborhood, who all benefit from it and usually are eager to cooperate. But strip mine operators and urban developers and road contractors and such folk seldom have to live personally with the erosion and mud and trouble that may result from the way they move earth and change the landscape. To them, sediment control and respect for the way watersheds work, even with cost-sharing, is likely to loom as simply an extra expense.

Under these circ.u.mstances, only stiff controls are going to make watershed programs and other devices work right. Local sediment ordinances are acutely needed, but are generally lacking or inadequate or poorly enforced, perhaps mainly because silt, in common with other pollutants, has some of its worst effects at points far removed from where it originates and local governments prefer not to stir up local developers and mine operators. It is a facet of what we called earlier the philosophical source of pollution.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Small Watershed Projects Boost Economy of Communities]

This being so, the good of the Basin and the Potomac as a whole is going to require the exercise of State and interstate and Federal power against silt as well as against other pollution, especially around populated areas, until such time as the populated areas have developed the political maturity to take firm hold of their responsibilities in such matters. Laws and ordinances of themselves solve nothing. For example, many of the pollutive dribbles along Rock Creek and other metropolitan watercourses are based in clearly illegal practices and hence slovenly inspection and enforcement of existing regulations.

Others occur because of defects in the sewer system that could and should be found and repaired. A shortage of manpower is one reason for such trouble, but poor philosophy is a bigger one.

States, interstate bodies, and munic.i.p.alities, however, can exert no control over another and rather shameful set of pollution sources noted earlier in this chapter. These are the delinquent Federal installations in the Basin, generally but not always in the neighborhood of the capital, that are contributing to the river's problem. Recent publicity, much of it deriving from aspects of this present study, has been bringing about some improvement, as has President Johnson's Executive Order 11288, which directed that Federal facilities set the best example in the matter of pollution control. But the order has obviously not been obeyed with uniform enthusiasm in all quarters, defective philosophy and short waste-disposal budgets being no exclusive property of local governments. Sometimes this is because limited funds force agencies to put waste treatment far down on their list for spending, and little is left over for it. Whatever the reason in individual cases, a continuation of persuasion and enforcement by the F.W.P.C.A. within the Federal establishment is going to be essential, and Federal installations ought to be required at least to equal or excel the quality of treatment provided by other waste producers on the same streams or bodies of water. Furthermore, all the diverse pollutive activities dependent on Federal aid and cost-sharing--such as road construction, for instance--ought to be brought under similar controls.

Certain major changes in public policy are needed if different techniques of water quality improvement are to be combined in such a way as to give the most economical, appropriate, and effective protection to specific streams or river systems. The most important of these needed changes concerns the role of flow augmentation as a tool, for inclusion of water quality storage capacity in Federal reservoirs is a fairly new and uncertain practice, and some rather deep pitfalls are becoming evident.

One pitfall has to do with Federal Cost-sharing and the way it affects the freedom of choice of the States and localities on which the primary responsibility for eliminating pollution must rest. In building treatment plants to lessen the load of wastes discharged to streams, they can presently obtain Federal grants of up to 55% of the facilities'

total cost. But if storage capacity for water quality--i.e., for flow augmentation--is provided in a Federal reservoir upstream, prevailing Federal policy based in a 1961 amendment to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act has been requiring them to pay nothing at all for it, though before such storage is authorized they must certify that an adequate standard of conventional treatment will be maintained downstream.

Obviously, if this continues to be so, when the inevitable choice comes between improving on that adequate standard by investing in better treatment, either at the beginning or later, and seeking river dilution from a reservoir, they will be forced by sheer economics toward the latter, whether or not it is the right thing to do or in an overall sense the cheapest.

Like other aspects of flow augmentation already discussed, this situation is a.n.a.logous to that of flood control, where communities have to pay a good part of the cost of local protection works or of controlling flood plain development, but can get reservoir protection free. In both cases, local authorities are stimulated toward choices that are not necessarily the right ones, taxpayers in general are forced to bear the weight of essentially local responsibilities, and the public may forever lose scenic or recreational amenities of great worth. The Department of the Interior, with a central interest in the problem, is taking the lead in an attempt to arrive at a better flow-augmentation policy that will permit right choices, put costs where they belong, and make certain that at the local level where pollution takes place there is sharp incentive to do something about it.

The other main difficulty has to do with the fact that river water has many uses, which augmentation may enhance or even stimulate. Water released from above during dry periods to increase and steady the river's flow and to help it handle wastes may also help navigation and hydroelectric power generation downstream, though neither of these is any longer a main factor in the flowing Potomac. Augmentation of flow can make the river prettier and more useful for recreation, and it can have stout beneficial effects on fish and wildlife. And under present conditions it const.i.tutes a large increase in water of improved quality for free use by irrigators and industries and munic.i.p.alities, which may so burgeon as a result that increased water consumption and waste production will cancel out the water quality effects of the reservoir releases in short order.

The need here, of course, is for some agency that can solidly guarantee that water released for quality control will be allowed to achieve that purpose and not be diverted to other uses that conflict with it. Where a river runs within a single State, and the State's const.i.tution permits, the State may be able to adjust its powers of control and provide the guarantee. But where more than one State is involved, as on all the main rivers of the Potomac Basin, a good forceful river basin agency is clearly needed to coordinate water supply with water demand, and to ensure that benefits and cost responsibilities of any necessary reservoirs are meted out where they belong.

In terms of legal and inst.i.tutional machinery, in fact, such a river basin agency is the most basic and urgent unfulfilled need along the Potomac, for the coordination and continuing supervision of water management in all its phases--a.s.surance of supply, flood protection, quality improvement, recreation--in the vast physical unit of land drained by the river. And because land's condition is so often influential on the quality and utility of water, the agency's concern and authority must encompa.s.s some fundamental matters of land use as well.

No clearer ill.u.s.tration of the potential of such a body could be found than the achievements of the present Interstate Committee on the Potomac River Basin--INCOPOT--during the quarter century of its existence.

Minimally financed and staffed, granted only advisory powers, toward the cure of a vast and growing sickness, it has managed in many ways to hold the line and even to improve things on the Potomac in a time when conditions on many American rivers were growing drastically worse and worse. Much credit accrues to some of the Basin States as well, but without the continuing focus and hard work of the INCOPOT people, dedicated to Basin thinking, it is doubtful that State efforts would have added up to much help for the Potomac as a whole. Our present strong hope of being able to clean up the river and its tributaries and to make them what they ought to be is perhaps mainly due to this organization's efforts.