Dallas cries a busted levee for departing manager

Dallas Assistant City Manager Ramon Miguez, the person who oversaw the city's understrength levee system is resigning ASAP.

The Dallas Morning News notes Miguez has been an assistant city manager since 1995, and overseen such big-ticket items as the construction of the Meyerson Symphony Center, the renovation of the Cotton Bowl and the planned modernization of Love Field.

So, the fail-possible levees, and their possibly inadequate sitting for pillars for the Calatrava bridges, can’t be all his fault.

That said, he’s going to HDR, about the biggest private engineering consulting firm for area city governments. Sounds like it’s just bailing out on the Dallas budget crunch. And, the difficulty in finding money to boost the levees to the latest Corps of Engineers standards.

That said, with him gone, he could be a convenient ex post facto dumping ground.

Trinity levees, Calatrava bridge in Dallas have serious problems

What The Dallas Morning News won’t tell you, but the Dallas Observer has, is that the Trinity River levees appear to have some serious problems.

Serious problems with drilling a pier for the Calatrava bridge. Serious problems with pouring the concrete for it.

The full Corps of Engineers report has details. Here’s something pulled out by an Observer reader:

"During the drilling of piers for Bent 6 (located 300' from the wet side toe of the west levee), the contractor reported that large quantities of sand in the formation liquefied even though slurry was being used to hold the excavation open. The liquefaction was so extensive that it destabilized the area within a 20' radius of the 7-foot diameter pier. This area had to be backfilled in order to be able to support the drill. When drilling resumed, a casing was used to support the excavation. However, the bottom of the pier heaved and blew out. The pier excavation was finally completed using both casing and slurry. During concrete placement, the contractor was unable to remove the casing with a 200-ton crane, so it remains a permanent fixture within the Floodway."

The story gets worse from there. Can they even place piers properly to build the bridge at all?

Former Mayor Ron Kirk is hopping mad about the delays. Hey Ron, try looking at the report first. Remember levees in a place called New Orleans four years ago?

Angela Hunt nails Trinity toll road in Dallas

While Wick Allison makes nice and Jim Schutze fulminates

Dallas City Councilwoman Angela Hunt nails it: with the serious concern the Army Corps of Engineers has about Trinity River levees here in Dallas, it’s time to abandon the idea of a Trinity toll road, and move TxDOT money to other projects. Dallas can still build Trinity Park without waiting on a toll road.

Oh, and whenever some sort of road is built there, tolls or not, there’s no way, with levee issues, it can be more than four lanes wide.

But, she does have one big boo-boo. She calls for a road connecting I-20 and the west side of Loop 12.

As I e-mailed her….

We already have Spur 408 connecting I-20 and Loop 12's west side in southwest Dallas.

Nothing new is needed.

Hunt e-mailed me later, saying that to meet the News' column length, she'd chopped some information about details of a connector to Walton Walker. Well, her e-mail, and her blog, which said the same thing, didn't really clarify stuff that much to me, or indicate what's "missing" that Spur 408 doesn't already do. (Now, if she had mentioned something similar to 408 stubbing off from the northwest corner of Loop 12/Walton Walker, that would be different.) Or, that 161, when actual freeway lanes are done, certainly won't do.

D Magazine’s Wick Allison does caveat that the North Texas Tollway Authority was going to pay part of some part-related construction.

Meanwhile, at the Observer, Jim Schutze (who else) describes just how bad the levee problem could be.

At Dallas City Hall, Leppert groans while Hunt smiles?

Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert said a few days ago he was unhappy with the Army Corps of Engineering for its allegedly slow pace on checking the quality of Trinity River levees.

Well, now that the Corps has found major levee problems, ones too big for even Perot money, or John Wiley Price shakedown best buddies, to fix, he’s probably wishing he’d kept his big mouth shut.

The report also found recent stupidities, like the new Dallas County Jail’s basement being dug into a levee.

Leppert tried to spin the findings vis-à-vis the Trinity toll road, but even supporters aren’t buying:

Michael Morris, director of transportation for the North Central Texas Council of Governments and one of the road's top supporters, said the news could eventually mean a halt to the toll-road work.

“It's a big deal,” he said.

And critics of the roadway, including Dallas City Council member Angela Hunt, who in late 2007 led an unsuccessful ballot initiative to take the four-and-six-lane toll road out of the Trinity River Corridor, say the findings ought to be red flags.
“What’s it going to take to get them to give up on this road?” Hunt said. “We already have an unsafe levee system, even without pouring tens of millions of tons of concrete into our floodway.”

More than this, Angela, more than this.

You were around a decade ago. You know the lies by deception of not mentioning a toll road in the original bond vote.

And, Tom? I’d just drop that idea of taking over DISD until you get your own house in more order.

Did the Snooze pull a fast one on the Trinity Toll Road?

It sure looks like it. Imagine waiting until a day AFTER Nov. 6 Prop. 1 vote to reveal that, sometime in October, a representative of the North Texas Tollway Authority Chairman Paul Wageman had specifically undercut Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert’s claim that the Trinity Toll Road’s price was locked in (follow the Observers sublink to the Snooze’s original article

NTTA Chairman Paul Wageman said last month that the agency would build the road only if it is viable -- meaning it produces enough in tolls to pay for construction. He said if the costs continue to rise above the current estimate of $1.29 billion, the agency may ask its partners -- including the city and the Regional Transportation Council, which sets priorities for the entire North Texas area, to increase their investments in the road.

But, now, Snooze reporter Bruce Tomaso is claiming the price is still locked in for the city of Dallas, although his exact phrasing leaves plenty of wiggle room.

And, pre-vote, Snooze ME George Rodrigue owned up to “garden-variety mistakes.” He didn’t mention “sitting on the truth for a month until after we know we’ve won the election to preserve the Trinity Toll Road.”

There’s a phrase for bull… like that…

Now, it may be true that Dallas winds up paying no more. But, it also may be true that it gets some significant sticker shock.

And, unfortunately, too many south suburban leaders went along for the ride, not that their comments probably were a six-point sway in the Dallas voting.

And Trinity toll road backers are trusting the Corps of Engineers WHY?

Turns out the Army Corps of Engineers’ post-Katrina upgrades to New Orleans levees only provide about 6 inches of additional flood relief rather than the 5.5 feet initially claimed. The ACE buried the 6-inch figure in an appendix in its voluminous report on levee upgrades. That led to this assessment by an outside engineering expert:

Ivor van Heerden, a hurricane and levee expert with Louisiana State University, said the mistakes are the latest example of sloppiness and a lack of scientific peer review in Corps’ work

“It’s peoples lives we’re playing with and all we’re getting is fuzzy science,” van Heerden said.

Isn’t fuzzy science how a four-lane parkway expanded to a four- six-lane toll road in the first place?

Trinity toll road: A pig wearing lipstick

A newly-made environmentalist acquaintance, whom I shall allow to remain anonymous, said the Trinity Park in Dallas was the lipstick on the lips of the Trinity Toll Road pig.

He agreed that the 1998 issue had been sold as a park.

OK, establishment Dallas, you won.

You still lied.

Trinity Tollway boosters and rejectors, here’s a good analogy

Certainly a better one than Steve Blow had in his newspaper column last week.

Go over to Fort Worth, to the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens.

Go all the way to the south end, where it borders I-30.

Stand there and listen.

That’s what a Trinity Park with a six-lane toll road will sound like. If not worse, as a freeway trapped inside levees will trap noise.

Toll road supporters, why don’t you just come out and scrap the park?

Refuting Trinity Toll Road supporters’ analogies

Steve Blow, in an opinion column instead of his normal Metro piece, says a Trinity Toll Road would be just like Northwest Highway at Bachman Lake. This would be merely laughable if it weren’t false, due to the simple fact that Northwest Highway isn’t a freeway-style toll road! I guess Blow’s analogy spinner forgot that one inconvenient fact. Ditto for earlier in the column, when he wondered if Garland Road at White Rock would be a suitable analogy.

Oh, thinking of that, Steve do you think Bachman Lake users would like a freeway-type toll road running past? Or Arboretum and White Rock Lake users, for that matter?

I would love to see a Trinity Park develop. But, to go there in the midst of a six-lane freeway that could be a designated truck route? No, thanks.

Dallas voters, vote “Yes” to vote no to an ill-planned toll road; Best Southwest leaders, it won’t help down here

Now, I’ve just moved back to the Metroplex, and don’t live in Dallas itself. Nonetheless, especially with the help of the Dallas Observer, I believe I can tell Dallas voters to vote “Yes” Nov. 6 to defeat the Trinity toll road, and speak to southside suburban claims as well.

Let me start right there. Per Jim Schutze, the only possible benefit anybody in the Best Southwest will get is if The Allen Group succeeds in its money-throwing and arm-twisting attempt to get the toll road to also be made into a truck route.

Yummm…. How many of you in Dallas are in favor of a nice, lovely, park being invaded by thousands of semis? Didn’t think so.

And, if The Allen Group wants a toll road truck route, shouldn’t it focus on Loop 9 instead? And, not just The Allen Group. What’s really needed is, indeed, the completion of an outer beltway around Dallas. If you’re The Allen Group, redistributing from your southside warehouses to Little Rock, there’s no need to drive through downtown. With a completed outer loop, there’s not even the need to drive the LBJ.

And, if you want to boost mid-Metroplex traffic more, try finding ways of limiting access on more sections of Loop 12, and boosting speed limits mildly.

I would likely, combined with other business in Dallas itself, visit a nice Trinity park. One with a lot of freeway traffic right beside it? Not so likely.