Hence it is probable that flow augmentation--sometimes called "flow dilution" or included in the broader term "flow regulation"--through the release of stored water, will be an important auxiliary tool in water quality management for a good while to come. This is not a form of flushing wastes downstream from their source and out of sight, as some opponents continue to insist, but a means of helping streams to oxygenate and decompose excess wastes by the same processes they have always used on natural and normal loads. On the other hand, neither is flow augmentation the end-all cure for pollution that enthusiasts of a few years ago claimed it to be. Its effect on slow masses of water is uncertain and probably minimal, and too much dependence on it even for flowing streams would obviously encourage neglect of the practical and moral need to keep filth and troublesome substances from getting into the streams in the first place. Furthermore, such dependence would lead rapidly to a point of diminishing returns, like the flood-plain development and protection cycle examined in the preceding chapter. Increases in populations and pollution would lead to a necessity to provide more and more augmentation of flows, with storage space in reservoirs becoming more and more expensive precisely as flood protection does. Flow augmentation is no substitute for good treatment, but a valuable adjunct. In the record drought summer of 1966 the South Fork of the Shenandoah, heavily polluted with municipal and industrial wastes near Waynesboro, and with fertilizer, manure, and other substances in drainage from the rich and intensively utilized farm country through which it flows, ran very low for months. In many places it was slimy and unpleasant, and aquatic life suffered to some extent, but the picture was not nearly so dismal as it would have been if the river had not been helped out more or less by accident. The source of this help was some 2000 gallons of water per minute that the Merck plant at Elkton and the Dupont plant near Waynesboro were releasing after having pumped it out of deep aquifers and used it for cooling. If all sources of pollution had been receiving adequate treatment, this minimal dilution might not have been so badly needed to avoid the fish kills and algal stagnation and other results that would have ensured without it. But "all sources" include the problematic agricultural drainage, and for that matter the definition of "adequate treatment" is going to have to go up and up in our expansive future.