salaries, more training
programs, and rigid mandatory State certification of operators'
abilities. Another reason can be a pinchpenny attitude on the part of
municipal authorities toward sewage treatment. It is one sizable
expenditure whose results cannot easily be pointed out with pride to
local taxpayers at election time, for its main effect is usually
downstream from the municipality itself. Thus the big encompassing
reason for bad plant operation--cutting corners, refusing to spend what
needs to be spent, failing to supervise--has to be called philosophical.
It comes from a failure on the part of local operators and authorities
and much of the public to comprehend the immorality of deliberate
avoidable pollution, and it may mean that municipal operation of
treatment plants is itself often a major source of trouble.

A clear example of this philosophical deficiency is one large Basin
treatment plant that was reported to have "handled"--i.e., properly
disposed of--a third less sewage sludge in 1965 than it had in 1960,
despite a large increase in the population it serves. The unhandled
sludge, of course, went straight into the local river for reasons of
convenience, economy, and callous indifference.

For the most part, large private industry demonstrates more
responsibility in this respect than the Basin's municipalities or
Federal installations. There are some miserable exceptions where
individual industries dominate a locality's economy and take casual
advantage of that fact. But responsible industry is concerned with
public relations, and knows that a fish kill or a gray-blue stretch of
blighted water downstream from its outfalls is the poorest kind of
public relations to be had.

To be able to say precisely how much bad plant operation is adding to
pollution in the Potomac will require exhaustive and continuous sampling
and analysis of a kind that may be expected now that the Water Quality
Act of 1965 is about to make itself felt through application of new
State water quality standards. But experienced observers in INCOPOT and
elsewhere feel strongly that bad operation does much more damage than do
over-aged or outgrown facilities, though these play a big part too.

Bacterial pollution--the category of most interest from a public health
standpoint--fluctuates a great deal in the Basin's flowing streams, but
is heavy in most of them by current standards during times of normal
flow. It may come from raw waste