After a couple miles of rolling on the Circle Trail my bike had me on the floating dock on Lake Wichita, looking at the new boardwalk under construction, with multiple cement piers already installed.
I do not know why Wichita Falls did not use the Fort Worth method of building bridge type structures over dry land.
Those Fort Worth hapless bridges, three pitiful little structures, have been stuck in slow motion construction mode ever since the bridge building began with a big TNT exploding ceremony back in October of 2014, with an, at the time, astonishing four year bridge building project timeline.
Four years to build three simple little bridges over dry land, to connect the Fort Worth mainland to an imaginary island. And now the year is 2020, with those three bridges still not built, still over dry land.
And back in the news again, due to funds having been found to pay the bridge builder money owed due to construction delays which have not been the fault of the builder, but have been the fault of the ineptness of those responsible for the Trinity River Vision Boondoggle mess.
And so, supposedly, if we can believe what we read, the bridge building contractor now has workers working on all three bridges, non-stop, all 7 days of the week.
The bridge building fiasco part of what has become America's Dumbest Boondoggle has been going on so long I don't remember when first it was realized something was dire wrong.
Maybe it was the bizarre, frequently repeated claim, that these three bridges were being built over dry land in order to save time and money.
That claim repeatedly made when the fact of the matter has always been that there will be no water under those bridges until a ditch is dug under them, with the Trinity River diverted into that ditch.
And it does not take a construction engineer's expertise to intuit that the most sensible way to build three bridges spanning a cement lined ditch would be to dig the ditch at the same time the bridges are being built.
Digging the ditch under the bridges, after they are in place, seems fraught with complication possibilities.
But, those complications likely will not reveal themselves for a long long time.
If the bridges are ever finished, money has to be found for the unfunded project in order to dig the ditch.
We have already seen one construction on the imaginary island sink due to a faulty foundation. It is not difficult to imagine a similar fate befalling those three hapless pitiful bridges.
Meanwhile the new boardwalk bridge over Lake Wichita is slated to be finished in a couple months...
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