efinite 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
sediment control were instituted in the 1930's, and in 1940 the
Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin, often called INCOPOT,
was formed by compact among the four Basin States and the District of
Columbia, with the formal permission of Congress. INCOPOT's powers are
only advisory in relation to State and community action against
pollution, and it has never been generously financed. But during the
quarter-century of its existence it has developed a wise combination of
investigation, persuasion, and public education to fight this problem,
with the result that on the Potomac conditions have in some ways
actually improved during a period of wars and booms and haphazard urban
expansion when many other rivers were headed straight down to stinking
corruption.

In 1956 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was directed by Congress to
undertake a Basinwide study to develop a plan for flood control and the
conservation of water resources and related land resources. The emphasis
in this assignment was upon a full long-term functional solution for the
Basin's water problems in feasible economic and technological terms. In
carrying it out, the Army enlisted the aid of other Federal agencies,
and their _Potomac River Basin Report_, published in nine volumes in
1963, presented the study's results and a plan for Basin water
development to meet needs to the year 2010. It is a monumental piece of
work to which anyone concerned with the Basin henceforth will have to
refer, because of the completeness with which it examines the Potomac
water resource and the careful technical knowledge it brings to bear on
Potomac problems.

However, the plan it presents--including recommendations for sixteen
major multipurpose reservoirs on the Potomac and its tributaries--would
bring about a massive and permanent revision of the free-flowing stream
system and would inundate much valley land. It aroused articulate
opposition at local, state, and Congressional levels, a good deal of
which was focused on the key Seneca dam on the Potomac main stem just
above Washington--an area where earlier single proposals for dams, first
at Great Falls and then at River Bend, had provoked similar resistance.