OCR Text |
Show Today there is increasing recognition of the importance of multiple- purpose development in these eastern basins. The 17-year experience in the Tennessee Valley is enough to suggest the possibility of using the resources of other basins to secure lower electric rates, improved rural life, further industrial development, usable navigation channels and greater opportunities for outdoor recreation. The great concentrations of population in the East are rendering proper husbanding and use of water resources as important there as in the West. The problems involved in assuring multiple-purpose programs are shared in different forms by most of the river basins analyzed in Part II of this report, except the Tennessee. In all of them conflicting interests must be harmonized, and the people of the region must be enabled to choose in terms of a clear understanding of alternative potentialities the combination of benefits which will best meet their needs. In the case of the Connecticut, a major problem involves the rela- tionship of multiple-purpose plans to the region's agricultural and industrial economy. Problems of evaluation where relatively scarce agricultural lands will be submerged if potential storage reservoirs are built must also be considered. The Alabama-Coosa in the Southeast, and the Connecticut in the Northeast, raise the problem of the suitable unit for comprehensive development in regions characterized by a complex of smaller basins. In both cases the possibilities of coordinated development of a group of rivers in a single program must be considered. Analysis of the Potomac Basin highlights the problems which arise out of apparent conflicts between multiple-purpose programs and the preservation of historic sites unaltered by the works of man. As in other eastern basins, conflicting views as to the desirability of hydroelectric development are also involved. This problem is very much present in the Ohio Basin. Although flood control works now reduce the threat to localities previously subject to most severe damage, and navigation facilities permit an important flow of traffic, multiple-purpose use of the waters of the basin has hardly begun. Hydroelectric potentialities are largely unused. As in the case of the western rivers, many other problems of water and land use come to light in the analysis of these basins of the East. The stories of the Connecticut, the Alabama-Coosa, the Potomac, the Ohio, and the Tennessee, therefore, have as much interest in our study of water resources policy as do those of the Columbia, Central Valley, Colorado, Missouri, and Rio Grande. 464 |