A Horizontal Tree & City Of Fort Worth TCEQ Tandy Hills Violators

For reasons purely accidental, I found myself spending a record breaking amount of time hiking around the Tandy Hills this morning. I think about 10 pounds melted away during the ordeal.

My one longtime reader may remember me mentioning, yesterday, that I came upon some eco-vandalism being done to the Tandy Hills, courtesy of the City of Fort Worth.

Today, as I neared the eco-vandal zone, the noise of diesel engines was way louder than the day previous, which seemed to indicate more than one diesel engine was running. That turned out to be a correct assessment.

Yesterday I was appalled that the city had gouged out dirt from the hills and used it to make 2 dam/bridges across creeks. Only one of the creeks is currently running water. I assumed that the creek running water would quickly be running over, and eroding, the new dam.

I was wrong. If I had consulted my hydraulic engineering manual I might have realized that when the water level reached the layer of crushed rock that it would permeate through the rocks. For the most part, that is what is happening, though, there are now puddles on top of the dam/bridge, creek water is running out the other side, stained gray, like glacial melt.

When I got past the leaking "dam" I came upon one of the noisemakers. It was very large, as in a fire engine size of large truck. On the side of the truck's driver's door it said FORT WORTH WATER TCEQ22015.

TCEQ is a Texas state agency, as in, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

This particular Texas Commission is believed, by many, to be severely co-opted and corrupted.

I assume those little creeks running through the Tandy Hills eventually empty into the Trinity River. I also assume that in most states a state agency that is responsible for protecting water quality would frown upon a city damming up creeks to make makeshift bridges. And killing trees and gouging the land in the process.

I hiked past the Big Water Truck and continued up to the top of Mount Tandy to come at the other City of Fort Worth truck from another direction. By the time I made it up and over and around Mount Tandy and came at the location of the second truck, from the north, it was gone.

But I could see that the focus of their attention had been on one of the Sanitary Sewer Manholes. Because the manhole cover was all wet. The wet manhole cover was just south of the highly unusual horizontal tree you see in the picture at the top.

That horizontal tree blocks the City of Fort Worth Water Trucks from getting to the next Sanitary Sewer Manhole, further north, by Tandy Falls. I wonder if the next thing that appalls me is going to be finding Tandy Falls filled in and dammed. That would make me damn mad. That might be the tipping point that turns me into an Eco-Terrorist.