By Adrian Murray Ft. Worth 9-12 Project
Real Estate planning is not something in its charter
Late in the evening of June 18 2007 Alexandria Collins lay sleeping in her room in her parents mobile home at the Skyline Mobile Home Park in Haltom City Texas. Alexandria called Ally by her parents Natasha & Aaron was four years old. She would never live to see five. Hours earlier a torrential rain had passed through the area.
The air was calm now as the rains moved to the north gathering in ferocity. But neither little Ally nor her parents could have had any idea of the sad mix of events which would converge so tragically that night of decisions made and not made of priorities and greed of visions and lack of vision that would merge violently and sadly in the dark of night.
To the north heavy rains inundated Keller and the Alliance Airport area. Up to five inches fell in just a few minutes.
The grasslands and trees which once naturally would have absorbed all that water were now acres of concrete streets and parking lots and houses and big box retailers. Instead the water was channeled into storm drains and quickly into creeks.
The Collins mobile home sat just 30 feet from Whites Branch Creek which feeds into Big Fossil Creek which in turn feeds into the Trinity River.
For decades this watershed had been plagued by flooding. But the family had just moved to their new home a month earlier and knew none of this. As little Ally lay sleeping a wave of water was barreling south swelling the banks of Whites Branch Creek.
At 1:00 a.m. that morning the parents noticed that water was rising inside their mobile home. Within minutes it was up to their knees; minutes later to their necks.
Natasha struggled to get Ally her sister and a young friend into a rowboat the father had maneuvered alongside the trailer. But the raging waters fought them; waves pounded the small boat and overturned it.
Natasha desperately clung to little Ally and was flung violently about in the roiling waters crashing into fences and trees. She felt Ally pulled from her grasp. Ally disappeared under the dark water and was swept away.
She was found hours later lying peacefully on her back in the creek bed on a pile of leaves. The official cause of death was drowning.
Unofficially the cause of death was greed.
The Tarrant Regional Water District is responsible for flood control in the areas under its domain. It along with the Army Corps of Engineers had been studying the persistent flooding in the Big Fossil Creek watershed for decades. Yet nothing was ever done for as the residents in the area were told the money simply wasnt there.
For all of Allys short life the focus of the Tarrant Regional Water District had been on something not in its charter: commercial real estate development.
Disguised as flood control the projects known as the Trinity River Vision and Trinity Uptown had been given life by the Fort Worth City Council just days after Natasha gave life to Ally. The projects consumed the energy resources and time of the water districts management and board of directors funneling hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into a grand scheme to construct a town lake at the confluence of the Clear Fork and West Fork of the Trinity River where Fort Worth itself had been born.
The watershed to the north could wait.
A feasibility study for the watershed had been initiated by the US Army Corps of Engineers in February 2001. In a letter to Congresswoman Kay Granger in November 2009 Col. Richard Muraski of the Corps stated that Due to a variety of issues including a lack of consistent funding and higher priority work … completion of the study has taken longer than normal.
He went on to state that the Corp recognized the history of destructive flooding in the area and that up to $100000 would be provided to continue the studies of the Big Fossil Creek watershed.
Meanwhile over $54 million has been spent to date by the Tarrant Regional Water District on the Trinity River Vision and the Corps of Engineers has committed $110 million to this alleged flood control project in an area that hasnt had a significant flood in over 60 years. The project has an estimated budget of $909 million a figure which is sure to rise.
Ally Collins could have known none of this of course. She was just a little girl with big-little girl dreams.
We will never know with certainty if Ally would still be with us today if the Corps of Engineers had not been shackled with a lack of consistent funding and higher priority work.
We can say however with some certainty that Allys destiny was determined in the days just after she was born when matters of priority and profit prestige and power affluence and influence all merged together in the great confluence of corruption and greed that would one day sweep her away in the cold dark waters of fate.
As Norman Maclean wrote Eventually all things merge into one. and a river runs through it.
Indeed a river does.
Adrian Murray is President of the Ft. Worth 9-12 Project.
