obviously good management will be needed to coordinate the releases and
avoid the waste of water.

It also means, if good principles of river-basin management are
followed, that reservoirs to supply water at Washington can be located
and designed so as to satisfy major upstream demands at the same time,
and that they can be fitted in with regional and Basin needs for water
quality improvement, flat water recreation, and in some places flood
protection. In such conjunctive planning, based in the Basin's physical
unity, commencing now and continuing on into the future as new needs and
new ways of satisfying them come to view, lies the main hope of
developing the Potomac water resource in such a way as to avoid waste of
money, waste of water itself, and waste of the landscape and the general
environment. Without it, nothing can result but a piecemeal haggling to
bits of the river system as local demands grow acute and local pressures
force the adoption of one-shot measures. With it, towns and areas and
industries can be guided toward sensible and thrifty action that fits in
with the wellbeing of the whole Potomac region--toward buying a share in
the water of a rightly designed, rightly placed reservoir large or
small, toward development of ground water resources where these are
adequate, toward the use of new technology that may be feasible and
suitable.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

The range of choices is certain to enlarge with time, and the ease with
which right choices can be made. In this computer age, mathematical
models of river systems, including the Potomac, are at work manipulating
hydrological data and quickly indicating optimum coordinated solutions
for given water problems that formerly would have taken many weeks to
solve, if indeed men could have arrived at such exact solutions at all.
Computers are no better than the material that is fed them, however, and
the need for new water data--for facts--is acute, if computers and the
men who run them and the policy makers to whom they report are to pick
the best ways of doing things. So is the need for means of giving
"intangible" values their right weight in the whole process. But the
computers are the keystone of the new technology and they are going to
make right coordination simpler.

With coordination also, as we shall see hereafter, there is the
strongest possibility of getting the river system clean again and
keeping it that way, and furthermore