I showed you this same view of the Trinity River on Saturday. At that point in time the sandbar was way bigger. Today, crossing the Beach Street Bridge over the Trinity I saw that the river has risen.
How can that be?
We have had no rain. Though some is predicted to fall tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow.
The river has risen so much it is about to re-float some inner tubes that have been dry docked. Maybe J.D. Granger is reading this in time to send out a rescue team to get the inner tubes before they go back into float mode.
I turned around from the inner tubes, and slowly disappearing sandbar, to look east to the Trinity Dam/Bridge, to see a white pickup truck sitting on the middle of the dam, above where the whirlpool was whirling strong before the water went low. I figured due to the rising water, the whirlpool must be back.
A white pickup truck. My one longtime reader knows I have a really bad history with white pickup trucks. So, I decided to bike on down to the truck and see if I could find myself in some sort of interesting situation.
Oh. It is a Tarrant Regional Water District white pickup. This seemed a bit less nefarious than an Express Energy Services white pickup.
A guy with some power tools was doing I do not know what. He was on the phone with someone, sounding a bit concerned. I thought if I stopped by the truck, with the worker guy right there, that I might get to ask what he was doing. But, he never got off the phone. I stood there taking pictures for a couple minutes and then continued on my way.
Even though the Trinity River was quite a bit higher than it was on Saturday, the whirlpool had not returned. I do not think any water was making it through the dam. Thus the rising water on the one side of the dam and shrinking water on the other side. This must be what the Tarrant Regional Water District guy was working on.
On Saturday I saw that DANGER sign on the next dam upriver, saying that "maintenance was in progress." No similar sign was on the Trinity dam outside Gateway Park.
Interesting to me that we have a river here that you, apparently, can turn on and off. Except when it is in flood mode.
The only other river I have lived up close to was the Skagit River in Washington. The Skagit River really does not have the off and on feature that the Trinity River has.
Except.
There is a really rugged, wild section of the Skagit beneath Gorge Dam. If you are having fun playing in that section and you hear sirens, you need to make it quickly to high ground, due to water being released. If you have seen the movie, Parallax View, you have seen how scary the Gorge Dam can be. The Trinity River seems fairly benign in comparison.
Except for those J.D. Granger inner tube floats.
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