Fort Worth's Trinity River Vision Gets Contaminated

There have been some who have opined that I am wrongheaded in my thinking that Fort Worth's Trinity River Vision will end up a likely boondoggle. Sadly, I think it's gotten to that point far ahead of when I thought it would.

When I first verbalized my opinion that this was a boondoggle in the making, I said that due to the vision being in an area of industrial blight, that it was highly likely that severely contaminated areas would be found, which would greatly increase the cost, if not prohibitively so.

And so, it has come to pass.

Yesterday we learned that the costs have soared. Some of those increased costs due to increased land value due to the Barnett Shale, you know, that thing underground that Chesapeake Energy has spent a fortune trying to convince the population of the great economic benefits to Fort Worth and environs from all the urban drilling.

So, yesterday we learned the cost of Fort Worth's Macularly Degenerated vision has soared, the signature bridges and canals have been dropped, replaced with trees, walkways and other "betterments," along the flood control bypass channel that was never part of the original vision.

And now, this morning, we learn that, oh my, what a surprise, serious ground contamination has been found, at an old TXU energy site, where lead contamination is in the soil and vinyl chloride and other solvents are in the groundwater.

An 18 foot deep cement wall needs to be built to stop the contaminated groundwater from seeping into the Trinity River, which I assume it is already doing.

I don't know if the Fort Worth Trinity River Vision project people have ever heard of the EPA Superfund. I suspect maybe not, after all the project is being run by the son of the Congresswoman who represents Fort Worth, a guy named J.D. Granger, who has absolutely no experience in running such a project, but who picked his mama well.

If the EPA determines that a polluted site is bad enough, Superfund funds may be available to help with the cleanup. I can't imagine that a Fort Worth polluted site would not be bad enough to qualify. Relatively environmentally friendly Tacoma, had a couple huge Superfund cleanup sites. I believe one was the biggest ever, that being the Asarco Smelter Superfund cleanup. On that site now sits huge condo developments with a great view of the Puget Sound, a sort of lake provided by Mother Nature, with a lot of "betterments," not built by the Tacoma Saltwater Vision.