This morning in my email I found the above editorial cartoon by Michael H. Price, published in the Fort Worth Business Press at some point during the 2006 TRWD board election which saw Jim Lane elected to the money dispensing position he has now held for 9 years.
Near as I can tell this particular editorial cartoon depicts TRWD water board candidates lamenting that they were no longer able to operate in secret, with their crystal clear Trinity River swimming hole now known to the great masses of unwashed Fort Worth voters yearning to swim clean.
I was thinking about that crystal clear Trinity River this morning, well, more accurately, I was thinking about the nasty un-clear Trinity River this morning.
Last week after I blogged Watching Fort Worth's Cowboy Napoleon Get Waterlooed By Craig Bickley & Michele Von Luckner a comment caused me to ask Is It Time To Pull The Mismanaged Plug On America's Biggest Boondoggle?
In that Plug the Plug on the Boondoggle blogging I made mention of what Craig Bickley had said that set off the Cowboy Napoleon's embarrassing tirade, with part of what Craig Bickley said being....
"They are trying to get people to get into a nasty river. Why don't you clean up the river first?"
Good question. Why is there not a concentrated effort to clean up the Trinity River? When rain falls in copious amounts, as it has lately, why does so much litter end up floating in the Trinity River? All the creeks I have contact with which flow into the Trinity River are littered messes when water runs high.
Village Creek, Fosdick Creek, Tandy Creek, all with astonishing amounts of litter getting flushed into the Trinity. There must be dozens upon dozens of other creeks flowing with the same littered mess.
Why?
From whence I came, Western Washington, there are several rivers which flow out of the Cascades into Puget Sound, the Nooksack, Skagit, Snoqualmie, Puyallup, Nisqually, Snohomish, Green, others I am not remembering. In flood mode I do not ever remember seeing masses of litter getting flushed into Puget Sound. I do remember seeing a lot of logs in the rivers, and one year, a house floating down the swollen Snohomish.
Does all that Trinity River litter end up in the Gulf? Creating a litter plume, ending up on Gulf beaches?
As for the other type of Trinity River pollution, of the e.coli don't eat the fish sort, where does that pollution enter the river? Are Lakes Benbrook, Worth and Eagle Mountain polluted with elevated e.coli and other bacterias? Or does that bad stuff enter the water after it leaves those reservoirs?
Back in the 1960s Puget Sound and other Washington bodies of water, such as Lake Washington, were badly polluted. One could not swim in Lake Washington or eat the salmon one caught there. Then the voters in the Puget Sound counties voted to clean up the water with new treatment plants, with the result being a clean Puget Sound and edible salmon and swimmers frolicking in Lake Washington.
Has there been any similar type effort to clean up the Trinity River before polluted, littered water reaches the Gulf of Mexico?
If not, why not?
If not, is it not the Tarrant Regional Water District which is responsible for the sorry quality level of the water in the Trinity River as it passes through Fort Worth?
Which brings us back to that question Craig Bickley asked "Why don't you clean up the river first?"
Still amazed that this cartoon (above) got published, where it got published, at the time it got published. In a Ruling Class Cheerleader periodical, yet. No accounting for taste, and timing is everything. And all the better for that. Good to see the message being carried forward, and to reflect that the statement thusly cartooned still has relevance.
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