Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Are America's Biggest Boondoggle's Bridges Dust In The Wind?

Months ago, the only one of America's Biggest Boondoggle's three bridges to nowhere, under construction, came to a halt due to the discovery of a design problem.

Make believe construction of that one bridge under construction began with a bang, literally, way back in 2014.

By "literally" we mean there actually was a big bang, as in J.D. Granger and his mama pushed the plunger on a device marked TNT to set off an explosion to celebrate the significant event of the imaginary beginning of construction on one of The Boondoggle's three simple little bridges connecting Fort Worth's mainland to an imaginary island.

Actual construction did not begin til much later than the time of the big bang.

The Boondoggle's apologists and propaganda purveyors long foisted the lie that the three bridges were being built over "dry land" so as to save money, when the fact of the matter is there was never going to  be any water under those bridges until a ditch was dug under them, with Trinity River water added to the channel.

Way back in 2013 I blogged about The Boondoggle's bridge building propaganda after receiving one of The Boondoggle's quarterly updates. A snippet of that blogging...

Speaking of Panther Island. On page 2 of the Trinity River Vision Boondoggle Update there is the headline "Paving the way to Panther Island."

Under that headline there is this short paragraph...

Three signature V-pier bridges will go out for bid together this November. By packaging the three bridges together a tremendous amount of money will be saved. Construction is scheduled to begin this winter.

Construction did not begin that winter. Or the next winter.

Recently I wondered about the current status of that one bridge The Boondoggle had under construction that had developed a design problem in need of a fix. I'd seen nothing in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about the bridge or the fix, since the initial news of the construction halt.

Then yesterday someone with the name Anonymous made a blog comment regarding the current status of The Boondoggle's bridge construction....

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "J.D. Granger Takes Time Off From His Congressional Duties To Wade In The Trinity River":

Speaking of slow motion bridges... I drove by the sparkling trash can last weekend. All the rebar has been removed from the forms on the Jacksboro Hwy columns and the scene generally looks like a ghost town. Not sure how long the delay was said to be, but no visible progress is the update for now. 
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Wow.

It was way back in March I blogged Design Woes Are Not The Only Problem With Fort Worth's Panther Island Bridges.

At that point in time the Star-Telegram informed us the fix would take about a month. It is now about five months later.

Has anyone seen an article in the Star-Telegram informing its readers about the status of The Boondoggle's bridge?

If I have said it once I have said it twice, Fort Worth suffers due to lacking an actual newspaper practicing actual investigative journalism.

Speaking of the Star-Telegram's lack of investigative journalism, has anyone seen an article about that which Mary Kelleher dusted us with today in her blog post titled EAST FORT WORTH...NOT JUST DUST IN THE WIND?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You might have missed this gem from the bloated face of Fort Worth journalism:

http://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/bud-kennedy/article87133152.html


The river’s makeover into a busy downtown tubing-kayaking attraction is one of Fort Worth’s great success stories.