Pins and needles here.
At 2:30 pm the Corps of Engineers releases its report on the city's proposed fix for the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. They're doing it not at any public venue but at the Oak Lawn offices of The Trinity Trust, the private lobby group for the Trinity River Project. We can assume that means the Corps has come up with a way to approve the city's proposed fix for the bridge -- piling up more dirt at the end of it -- and green-light completion of the bridge.
The Corps has been close-mouthed all morning abut this event: The public information office of the Fort Worth Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers earlier today was telling reporters, if you can believe it, that they didn't know anything about it. So we can also assume some very close choreography has been going on between the Corps and the city in preparation.
Meanwhile we have the amazingly unbelievable account of a levee break near Regal Row and Stemmons Freeway, supposedly because of a leaky water pipe. Channel 8 reported it last night; their dramatic video of the sinkhole is also after the jump. Our Patrick Michels took pictures today of crews repairing the problem.
The city says the levee broke because a pipe leaked.
The problem with that story is that this break has occurred right where serious mud slides in the levee took place two years ago. And, we are told, there have been other breaks upstream in the levee system due to "wet weather."
The levees can't stand up to wet weather?
Not really what we want to hear about a flood control system, is it?
Like, what if the story of Noah in the Bible had ended with "unable to
compete work on boat due to inclement conditions?"
S'what my column is about this week: The Corps will do anything to keep
the transportation element of this plan alive, proving that the Trinity
River project really isn't a flood control project. It's a
transportation project, like that Mister Go channel in New Orleans.
And, uh, they got sued over that, right? And lost.