h is a national concern, is not going to
be simple. A good program must be instituted 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.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

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 clusters of population
in the upper parts of the Basin. Furthermore, pollution here has already
been given quite