In Leading Off this morning, I pointed to Jim Schutze’s assertion over on Unfair Park that he has talked to unnamed people who have talked to people at City Hall who have told them (the unnamed people) that the Trinity levees might need to be demolished and rebuilt with concrete to get things square with the Army Corps of Engineers. Schutze wrote:
[B]ased upon their [the unnamed people’s] talks with city officials, it’s their understanding that the corps will demand as a levee fix that concrete curtain wall that’ll bedrock pretty much the length of the levees. The question is whether the curtain wall can be dug and poured from the top of the existing levees — by digging a trench 20 to 100 feet deep — or whether the levees have to be demolished first.
This notion struck me as nuts, so I called Rebecca Dugger Rasor, the director of the Trinity River Corridor Project. She’s an engineer. She works at City Hall. If anyone at City Hall knows what’s going on, it’s Rasor. She says that the idea of lining the entire levees system with what’s called a “slurry cutoff wall” (what Schutze calls the concrete curtain) has been brought up. But neither side sees that as an option to be taken seriously. What they are discussing in earnest is building slurry cutoff walls at the toe of the levees, where the levees meet flat ground southeast of downtown.
But demolishing the levees to build these walls? That’s Schutze’s fantasy. First, you’d have to build levees outside the existing levees if you wanted to demolish them. Is that even possible? As Rasor said, you ask an engineer if something’s possible, they’re always going to say yes. But she called the idea of demolishing the levees to install slurry walls “so far afield that it’s not even funny.”
