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 2-1/2 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--that after cleaning up the network of streams and
ensuring against their repollution and the desecration of their
landscape, men will be able to leave them respectfully alone to run down
toward the Chesapeake Bay as they have run during and before human
memory.
However, it is not so. Whatever human population might be considered
ecologically tolerable under natural conditions for the nine million or
so acres of earth, rocks, vegetation, and water that make up the Basin,
it has long since been exceeded by hundreds on hundreds of thousands.
And if those who predict such things are right, it is going to be
exceeded much further in the near and middle future. Today's
approximately 3.5 million Basin inhabitants are expected to double by
the turn of the century, with accompanying complex shifts in the ways
they will be making their livings and in the numbers of them who will
live in the country as compared with the cities and towns. Thereafter,
further geometric increases are contemplated, calmly by some
contemplators and less so by others.
As a result of past and present populations and their activities,
conditions in the Basin--including the river system--are necessarily
far from natural, for specific structural development is not the only
form of change. The Potomac environment has been adapted to man's use,
and in places where that use has been unreasonable it is already in
trouble. Clearly it is going to have to be manipulated artificially to
some extent to meet people's demands on it and to guard it against the
worst effects of their numbers. In fact, very luckily, it already is
being so manipulated in dozens of ways ranging from methods of farming
and forest management to sewage treatment. It is possible to hope that
present population forecasts may somehow find less than ample
fulfillment, but it is not possible to count on it for planning
purposes. Nor is it possible to wish out of existence situations already
serious.
[Illustration: WATER SUPPLY POTOMAC RIVER, WASH. D.C.]
At times during the hot months of drouthy 1966, the climax of a dry
cycle that had begun to develop five years earlier, the Washington
metropolis was not too far from the bottom of its water barrel. The
situation was not as bad as in some other Northeastern regions, nor as
bad as some local analyses claimed, but it was bad enough. The highest
daily withdrawal of the year was on June 26, when the metropolitan water
intakes in the Potomac sucked out approximately 380 million gallons. Of
this some 30 million gallons had to do with a pumping pattern pertinent
to adjustments within the system, and the other 350 million went for the
use and refreshment of a metropolis afflicted by summer's heat. The
total figure represented less than half of the river's flow at that
time.
[Illustration: GROUND WATER LEVELS WASHINGTON, D.C. AREA]
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.