Nov 9, 2006 6:14 pm US/Central
Engineers Redirecting Trinity River In Dallas
by Bud Gillett
DALLAS (CBS 11 News) ―
It's a big task, but the City of Dallas and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are moving a river. They're diverting the Trinity River south of downtown Dallas for two reasons: to safeguard the downtown area from flooding and to protect a major traffic artery that leads into it.
The Trinity River is already flowing through its new home. The old channel is just out of sight, about 350-feet further on. Re-directing the river is a drastic step, but it solves some big problems.
Don't let the current Texas drought fool you, the Trinity River has shown, many times, it is capable of leaving whole sections of Dallas under water.
"What we're trying to do here is to force the river to go a certain direction," said Ted Nicholson, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Engineers dug the alternate channel where it crosses underneath Interstate-45, leaving two final earthen 'plugs' to be removed to re-direct the river.
The water now flows under a much wider span of the bridge… a part that doesn't require piers to actually be in the channel itself.
"Where we're standing right now is under danger of being washed out, and if you wash the piers out, the bridge could collapse," Nicholson said.
With the river re-directed, water cannot touch the piers. It also means the piers will no longer catch flood debris and clog the river, backing it up into South Dallas or even downtown.
Greg Ajemian, of The Trinity River Project, says, "We have a Dallas floodway system, in downtown Dallas, that's vulnerable to a significant flood; so we could have something in excess of $8 billion in flood damage if those levees were ever to fail."
The old channel will be partially filled in, but a portion of it will still retain water to create marshland for the Trinity's chain of wetlands.
"We want to try to work that in with wetlands and prairie lands to try to raise the ecological value to a higher level and be something that our public can come down and get away from downtown Dallas," Ajemian said.
The undertaking is woven into Dallas' overall Trinity River Project, which will eventually offer flood protection and wildlife recreation from I-20 in the south, all the way up to the City of Irving.
(© MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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