It's not just cars Dallas dumps in the Trinity River. It's tires, too -- tons of them embedded in the muck and stranded along the banks. Particularly cluttered is the stretch of river between the Trinity River Audubon Center and Interstate 20.
"They just dumped load after load of tires, and they dumped them on the bank of the river channel," Assistant City Manager Jill Jordan tells The Dallas Morning News. "Last year we pulled out what we could from up top, where our employees could get to them safely. But these are on the banks and in the water and have started floating down and are now all the way to I-20."
See also: A Company Fixing a Trinity River Damn Discovers Where Dallas Dumps Its Stolen Cars
Enter Good Earth Corp. and Hess Construction. The Dallas City Council will vote on January 22 on whether to pay them a combined $3.3 million to pull tires from the Trinity and trash from Lake Ray Hubbard.
That's a lot of scratch, but, as Jordan points out in a note to the council, there are enough tires in the river, and enough trash at Ray Hubbard, that it's "causing deteriorating water quality."
Also, it's not like these cleanups happen every year. The last city-led effort happened in 2005 and 2006 and consisted of two code compliance workers pulling 42,000 tires from empty lots and along creek and river beds, according to the DMN.
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