Boy howdy, the Texas Republicans were due, I tell you. Having not shown their red baboon asses in quite some time, you could just feel the stupid rambling down the tracks. Well, the crazy train is officially in the station with these yahoos are wanting to deregulate safety measures on dams across Texas.
Little known fact, every lake in Texas is man-made. That means we have quite a few dams, most holding back water around cities across the Lone Star. Now say some rich dude in Dallas wants to play JR and gets himself a ranch. Well, his show cattle are gonna need a lake, but come hell, or high water, he doesn't want to have to make sure its safe.
Enter Vic Tinsley, such a dimestore cowboy and his puppet in the Capital, one Rep. Charlie Geren. These two knuckleheads are trying to deregulate dam common sense because Tinsley's got him a dam that could wipe out a highway.
Most Texas dams would go unregulated under House-passed bill
By Tim Eaton, AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
http://www.statesman.com/...
The vast majority of dams in Texas would no longer have to meet state safety requirements if a Fort Worth lawmaker gets his way.
The proposal by Rep. Charlie Geren to end state oversight of most dams came up on April 19 during a long day of debate on a bill to continue the operations of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which regulates private and public dams. Geren, a Fort Worth Republican, portrayed it as a tweak in the legislation designed to protect rural farmers and ranchers. It passed without objection.
Geren pointed to one Fort Worth businessman, Vic Tinsley, who owns a ranch near Mineral Wells with a dammed 300 acre-feet pond. The commission ordered him to modify his dam to be able to withstand 16.9 inches of rain in one hour — an amount that Tinsley said would be unprecedented.
Geren pointed to one Fort Worth businessman, Vic Tinsley, who owns a ranch near Mineral Wells with a dammed 300 acre-feet pond. The commission ordered him to modify his dam to be able to withstand 16.9 inches of rain in one hour — an amount that Tinsley said would be unprecedented.
"If it rains 16 inches, we're all dead," he said. "Charlie Geren's amendment is well justified to protect us little guys from this bureaucratic abuse."
Bureaucratic Abuse? Really? Let's see here.
I know for a fact the record in Texas was in Thrall, outside of Taylor, south of Dallas, getting a single rainfall of 36 inches. A few years ago, Burnett got something like 22 inches. In 2007, Marble Falls got 18 inches in a few hours, which was crazy.
And what if it rained like that for a few days, like it did in Houston in 2004?
What then Tinsley? You gonna do a lot of hemming and hawing peppered with gosh, who would have expected such a thing that seems to happen a few times a decade here in Texas? You gonna act all surprised that your lack of dam common sense wiped out a highway, where flash floods incur more deaths and damage than when it hits neighborhoods?
I can't believe the Republican Party of Texas is ready to throw their fellow Texans under the flash floods so their rich patrons can go out and play JR on the cheap.
But then again, these guys have no dam common sense so I don't know why I am so shocked.