CONFLUENCE: A River & A Creek Runs Through Tarrant County Losing Dollars & Lives

Adrian Murray and John Basham are running for seats on the Tarrant Regional Water Board.

You can go to the Tarrant Votes website to learn more about Adrian Murray and John Basham and what they think needs to be done to fix a thing or two in this corrupted zone of Texas.

Adrian Murray and John Basham's platform is fairly straightforward.

-NO MORE EARMARKS
-OPEN AND HONEST GOVERNMENT
-NO MORE MISUSE OF TAX DOLLARS
-END ABUSE OF EMINENT DOMAIN

Below is a speech recently given by Adrian Murray. Read the speech and I think you'll agree this is someone who we can trust to do good things as opposed to those currently doing bad things that are not in the public interest....

In the late evening of June 18, 2007, Alexandria Collins lay sleeping in her room in her parents mobile home at the Skyline Mobile Home Park in Haltom City. Alexandria, called Ally by her parents, Natasha and Aaron, was four years old. She would never live to see five.

Two hours earlier, a torrential rain had passed through the area. The air was calm now as the rains moved to the north, gathering in ferocity. But neither little Ally nor her parents could have had any idea of the sad mix of events which would converge so tragically that night, of decisions made and not made, of priorities and greed, of visions and lack of vision that would merge violently and sadly in the dark of night.

To the north, heavy rains inundated Keller and the Alliance Airport area. Up to five inches fell in just a few minutes. The grasslands and trees which once naturally would have absorbed all that water were now acres of concrete, streets and parking lots and houses and big box retailers. Instead the water was channeled into storm drains and quickly into creeks. The Collins' mobile home sat just 30 feet from Whites Branch Creek, which feeds into Big Fossil Creek which in turn feeds into the Trinity River. For decades this watershed had been plagued by flooding. But the family had just moved to their new home a month earlier and knew none of this. As little Ally lay sleeping, a wave of water was barrelling south, swelling the banks of Whites Creek.

At 1:00 am that morning the parents noticed that water was rising inside their mobile home. Within minutes it was up to their knees. Minutes later, to their necks. Natasha struggled to get Ally, her sister and a young friend into a rowboat the father had maneuvered alongside the trailer. But the raging waters fought them, waves pounded the small boat and overturned it. Natasha desperately clung to little Ally and was flung violently about in the roiling waters, crashing into fences and trees. She felt Ally pulled from her grasp. Ally, screaming, was swept away.

She was found hours later, laying peacefully on her back in the creekbed on a pile of leaves. The official cause of death was drowning.

Unofficially, the cause of death was greed.

The Tarrant Regional Water District is responsible for flood control in the areas under its domain. It, along with the Army Corps of Engineers, had been studying the persistent flooding in the Big Fossil Creek watershed for decades. Yet nothing was ever done for, as the residents in the area were told, the money just wasn't there.

For all of Ally's short life, the focus of the TRWD had been on something not in its charter: commercial real estate development. Disguised as flood control, the project known as the Trinity River Vision was given birth by the Fort Worth City Council just days after Ally was born. The project consumed the energy, resources and time of the water district's management and board, funneling hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into a grand scheme to construct a town lake at the confluence of the Clear Fork and West Fork of the Trinity River where Fort Worth itself had been born. The watershed to the north could wait.

A feasibility study for the watershed had been initiated by the US Army Corps of Engineers in February 2001. In a letter to Congresswoman Kay Granger in November 2009, Col. Richard Muraski of the Corps stated that, "Due to a variety of issues, including a lack of consistent funding, higher priority work and technical shortcomings, completion of the study has taken longer than normal." He went on to state that the Corp recognized the "history of destructive flooding" in the area and that approximately $100,000 would be provided to "continue the studies of the Big Fossil Creek watershed."

Meanwhile, $54 million has been spent to date by the TRWD on the Trinity River Vision and the Corps of Engineers has committed $110 million to this alleged flood control project, in an area that hasn't had a significant flood in over 60 years. The project has an estimated budget of $909 million, a figure which is sure to rise.

Ally Collins could have known none of this, of course. She was just a little girl, with little girl dreams. We will never know with certainty if Ally would still be with us today if the Corps of Engineers had not been shackled with a lack of consistent funding and higher priority work. We can say, however, with some certainty, that Ally's destiny was determined in the days just after she was born, when matters of priority and profit, prestige and power, influence and arrogance merged together in the great confluence of corruption and greed that would one day sweep her away in the great dark waters of fate.

As Norman Maclean wrote, "Eventually, all things merge into one and a river runs through it."

Indeed, a river does.