This morning, Texas has some more staggeringly bad news for you. Houston again. Bad even by their standards. Brace yourselves. But don’t worry. After we’re done talking about how enormously stupid this was, I promise I’ll give you some good beaver cheer.
Animals in peril after TxDOT bulldozes beaver dam in West Houston drainage ditch
For three years, a roadside drainage pond at Interstate 10 and Barker Cypress Road has been a surprising home to West Houston wildlife, supporting countless fish, birds and turtles — not to mention an alligator or two.
But thanks to a TxDOT maintenance crew, the unlikely sanctuary met its end Wednesday morning when a bulldozer leveled a dam made by a family of beavers. Water quickly drained from the pond, leaving the unsuspecting creatures to fend for themselves.
On a Thursday visit to the site, Drew Karedes from KHOU Channel 11 discovered thousands of fish rotting in the sun, labeling the now muddy patch a “graveyard for animals.” leaving the unsuspecting creatures to fend for themselves.
“The beavers would walk right up to you,” Joe French, Ron Hoover general manager, explains. “You could pat them and everything. They didn’t have a care in the world. There are a lot of families that would come out here to spend family time.”
So the department of transportation didn’t like all that nature in their drainage channel and decided to kill everything in sight and rip out the dam. Remember this on CYPRESS RD and used to be connected to one of the last bayous in the state. But not any more. Now it is a rotting pile of dying fish. Which TxDOT has promised to come back and clean up.
(It took me nearly three hours to find the email of the man who was responsible for this decision yesterday. Apparently if you’re a state employee making 82,000 a year in taxpayer money and some monsterously bad decisions, you make sure people can’t send you email. He’s second from the right end in this picture.)
TxDOT breaks ground on Grand Parkway expansion
Among the elected officials and members of the Texas Department of Transportation conducting a ceremonial groundbreaking Tuesday morning on the Segment E expansion of State Highway 99/Grand Parkway are, from the left, Lance LaCour, Joan Huffman, Ned Holmes, Bill Callegori, John Barton, Michael Alford and Mary Evans. The highway will connect Interstate 10 to U.S. Highway 290.
The comments by the motor home and marine business next door are fairly heartening. They obviously appreciated their natural neighbors. Even their beavers. I assume the footage of the original habitat was theirs? Another mysterious place where alligators and beavers lived side by side. Maybe the news channel had visited before? Either way, now its a mud puddle.
(Just remember that way back when the city of Martinez wanted our beavers dead they paid Dave Scola to go on National Television and call the creek that John Muir’s wife named Alhambra a “Drainage channel”. That very creek that Italian families had earned their living on for a hundred years was part of their flood culverts. I have since learned that the rule book for wantonly destroying wildlife in creeks says that first you should just try and get away with it, and if you unfortunately get stopped, defend your action by saying it was just a “drainage channel.” The media usually doesn’t question that.)
Okay Heidi, where’s that good news you promised?
Last night 20 cub scouts and parents from troop 254 in Fairfield came to Martinez for a beaver viewing. Their scout leader works at Shell and had met Jon at the beaver dam before. Then got my info from Cathy Ivers and arranged a beaver tour. We passed out tattoos and information, talked about the ‘beavers building a neighborhood’ and then saw two kits, a yearling and mom. They even got a chance to hear some whining. Several other people just joined in to see what we were looking at. What a nice group of kids!
Worth A Dam: saving beavers one boyscout at a time.
