8 January 11 - 17, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents More recently, in July 2022, a main break in a southern Dallas neighborhood gushed water from a hole in the road, flooding one man’s home and cars. “Thunder! Like rocks coming all over the top of my house,” the resident, who was Black, told WFAA at the time. “I said some- thing ain’t right.” Standing near the former Blue Hole, San- difer noted that it’s situated in a community of color. The median household income for the adjacent Bonton neighborhood is a little more than $32,000, according to the real es- tate website Point2Homes. Bonton has also been considered a food desert. A documentary named for two histori- cally Black neighborhoods in South Dallas, Bonton + Ideal, highlighted the social and economic divides within the city’s geo- graphic split. Residents from these lower enclaves told filmmakers that they grew up without electricity, running water, good schools and other services. Homes were ex- posed to regular flooding, having been con- structed on the Trinity River floodplain. Southern Dallas residents have long en- dured issues far less common elsewhere in the city, including a lack of trash pickup, fair housing and street repair. A District 8 chal- lenger in last May’s City Council race, Da- vante Peters, told the Observer ahead of the election that community members face snaillike police response times. That district for years suffered from a nightmare of toxic waste. South Dallas’ Flo- ral Farms neighborhood once served as the site of a 70,000-ton hill of illegally discarded asphalt shingles. Residents fought to topple the so-called Shingle Mountain from 2018 to 2021. “Historically,” Peters told the Observer last spring, “they use our side of town as the dumping grounds.” Detractors argue that Dallas’ legacy of racism plays a signifi- cant role in the environmental injustice of the Blue Hole today. Or, as Sandifer put it: “In the back of my mind, I always said, ‘This would never, ever happen in North Dallas.’” D allas Environmental Commission member Temeckia Derrough worried about the mosquito population in the park near the Blue Hole. The pests, which are carriers of diseases like West Nile, had been “horrible” last summer. During a commission meeting in October, Derrough told a Dallas Water Utilities repre- sentative that the supposed 3.6 million-gal- lon leak had occurred in her district. “That park is very utilized by the com- munity of Blacks,” Derrough said. “I’m just going to be honest. It’s a Black park.” She pressed Regina Stencel, assistant di- rector of the water department, for answers: Were residents notified? No, because there wasn’t an interruption in service. Did the leak spike water bills? No, because it was on a transmission line, not a metered one. Vice Chair Esther Villarreal relayed her own concerns. Bonton residents had re- ported “foul-tasting water.” Could the water department speak to that? Stencel denied any water-quality issues, saying that pressure had been maintained: “There is no way that the surrounding water can go back into the pipeline.” But, speaking with the Observer in De- cember, Sandifer likened the once-malfunc- tioning pipeline to an “open wound.” He feared that if the pressure had in fact some- how dropped, swamp water could have been sucked back into the system before reaching residents’ faucets. Sandifer delivered impassioned com- ments during that October Environmental Commission meeting. The way he sees it, Dallas’ top natural asset is the Great Trinity Forest, which helps to cleanse the urban air and is home to a wide array of plants and ani- mals. “The water main break of discussion persisted since at least 2013, visible on Google Earth, at this location,” he said at the meeting. The area in question is now a “near eco- logical dead zone,” Sandifer said. Hundreds upon hundreds of trees, many 20 or more feet high, were slowly drowned. “The die-off of trees here is shockingly evident on both sides of U.S. 175,” Sandifer said. “It’ll serve as a tombstone,” he added, his voice sharply punctuating that word, “for this part of the Great Trinity Forest for decades to come.” Environmentalists view the Blue Hole as a warning of aging infrastructure-caused ca- lamity. The offending 30-inch pipeline was constructed in 1952, during the Truman ad- ministration, Sandifer said during the com- mission meeting. The Lewisville Dam, roughly 40 miles north of the Great Trinity Forest, has also flirted with catastrophe. In 2015, The Dallas Morning News re- ported that the dam was one of the country’s “most dangerous” as engineers had scram- bled to patch multiple areas of concern. A breach could reportedly “put 431,000 peo- ple in harm’s way,” potentially unleashing a “65-foot-tall flood wave traveling 34 mph” that could swallow a broad swath of several North Texas communities. Downtown Dallas would get engulfed by some 50 feet of water, the article noted. Thankfully, repairs have since been made. Old infrastructure contributed in 2021 to North Texas losing around 40 billion gallons of water, according to KERA. The problem has only worsened in the years since. Dallas reportedly witnessed nearly 15 billion gal- lons go down the drain in 2022, costing $20.3 million. Today the Blue Hole serves as a grim les- son about how the city chooses to confront issues of environmental conservation and sustainability. “I guess you could correctly say this is a watershed moment, perhaps, in raising awareness of how we treat our open spaces,” Sandifer said. Some recent progress has been made to- ward improving the state’s water infrastruc- ture. Texas voters in November approved a constitutional amendment to create a $1 bil- lion water fund, marking a modest boost in concern for a not-so-sexy issue. But critics contend that the money won’t stretch nearly far enough. The measure, Proposition 6, will help to upgrade outdated water systems and create new water supplies. But one state lawmaker has argued that fully addressing Texas’ wa- ter predicament would carry a strikingly higher price tag, one totaling $500 billion. Neal views the Blue Hole scandal as an opportunity to home in on antiquated water infrastructure. He wonders how many un- discovered leaks could be silently draining resources today. Neal wants to see a push toward greater water reuse and aquifer storage and recov- ery. He doesn’t want to see new reservoirs pop up “in other people’s backyards” — builds that require tons of concrete, contrib- uting to climate change. When it comes to the zone formerly known as the Blue Hole, Neal believes that nature can mend much of the devastation: “That area has recovered on its own before, when [it] was an agricultural area, and so it can do it again.” Still, Neal said, it’s “embarrassing” for the city that it seemingly took a viral TikTok video to spur officials into action. Sandifer noted that other Texas metro ar- eas, such as San Antonio and Austin, will shell out millions in funding to try to repro- duce what we have here naturally. Not em- bracing our wonderful habitat, one that’s easily accessed via DART, is “where we fail as Dallasites,” he said. But Sandifer also sees some glimmers of silver lining: Many have become increasingly conscious of eco-solutions like recycling and water conservation. “And I hope that they get out and have their own voice heard in their own communities, or in the Metroplex and North Texas,” he said, “because a lot of peo- ple say that there’s not a lot of nature here. “There really is,” he added. “You just have to look for it.” Nathan Hunsinger Nathan Hunsinger Above: Sandifer and Neal survey the trees suffering from oversaturation. Right: Dead trees in the Trinity forest. Unfair Park from p6 >> p10
