Brazos Bulks Up
(River • Richmond)
About 30 feet and rising, still contained within its banks…
(Click photo for a very large version.)
While the river’s getting big for sure, this is not anything approaching a flood event or even a big deal.
This is what happens when the Brazos climbs out of its banks, but even that fell short of flood stage.
There’s just a lot of flex in this river. When it’s down, it trickles. When it’s up, it roars.
→ B.Dunn, Feb 02, 2010, 04 20 pm
Wild Things Swim Fast
(River • Richmond)
As a few sharp-eyed readers are aware, the One-Acre Ranch is conveniently located along the banks of the Brazos just opposite the increasingly impressive Fort Bend County Jail. This has naturally sparked a few years’ debate over whether miscreant inhabitants of said facility could ever engineer an escape, and prolong it by swimming the river.
Clearly the river could be breached in times of drought, but normally the Brazos moves with a good deal of force, and the debate has proceeded under the assumption of normal river conditions. True, a curious steer did succumbed to the siren sounds of a local resident’s daughter’s outdoor birthday party a few years ago, and swam across to enjoy the screaming chaos that erupted upon his arrival at the cake table. But surely the average ax murderer or crack distributor is too overweight, over-wrought or tweaked out to go the distance?
Maybe so, but their progeny are up for the task, as evidenced earlier this afternoon when three young men under 18 years of age managed to escape from the county juvenile detention facility adjacent to the adult jail. They ran north to the river, dove right in and swam across to our side (albeit a half-mile upstream).
The news hasn’t made the local press yet, but exceedingly reliable sources inform us here that one young man surfaced and pulled himself ashore at Lucy’s Florist Shop under the U.S. 90A bridge, whereupon he was placed under arrest by Richmond police.
The other two escapees attempted to avoid that fate by dog paddling a few yards off shore. Cops were dispatched down river (next door to my house, to be exact) and worked their way along shore back up to Lucy’s, just in case. But the city fire department did the heavy lifting, hoisting a motor boat into the water, piloting the craft downstream a couple hundred yards and then extracting the wet prison breakers.
Plenty of fun and excitement all around, with a PG-13 ending and not a single Taser shot fired.
→ B.Dunn, Dec 30, 2009, 08 07 pm
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The Glass Is Half Full - But Of What?
(Richmond • Be Afraid)
OK, I’m going to make this quick because, as my wife reminded me earlier this morning, I am not a reporter anymore.
So it turns out that the federal Clean Water Act passed in the 1970s. New industries and chemical compounds sprang up in America since then, and water regulations were slowly updated, although not enough to keep pace with new solvents, petro-compounds and other carcinogens making their way into your drinking water. Then, beginning about 2000, all clean-water regulation updates stopped. Huh. Wonder why that is?
Anyway, the gist is this: Most regulation of the carcinogenic crap in our drinking water is based on 20-year-old medical science. So even if the source of your water is not in violation of the law over pollutants allowed therein, drinking the stuff still can be bad for your health. Charles Duhigg of the New York Times has been doing a great job dragging this story into the light of day.
He and the Times even made their research available in database form. So if you live in little old Richmond, Texas, like I do, you can go here and find out that the glass of water you had after breakfast this morning likely contained more Arsenic, Radium-226 and radioactive alpha particle activity than is healthy for you or your wife and kids. But it’s legal. Isn’t that nice?
And that your water probably contains 16 other contaminants in amounts not believed to adversely effect your health, yet most of the other cities in your county have fewer contaminants than that, so what the hell?
You say you’re from Fort Bend County but not Richmond? Then just go here and you can look up the contamination report for every water system in the county. Not from Fort Bend? Well then, go here and look up your water supplier in just about any county in Texas. Not from Texas? OK, start here.
It’s fascinating reading if you have the time and you’re in the right mood. For instance, Cinco Ranch folks are drinking water with a lot fewer contaminants than mine. I sure wish we got Cinco Ranch water. On the other hand, the Blue Ridge West Municipal Utility District serves up about the worst glass of water in Fort Bend County, with alpha particles including radon and uranium that have been reported above both health and legal limits on more than one occasion recently. ‘Course that’s a couple of stones’ throws from the famous Blue Ridge Landfill, whose owners aspire to (no shit) pile refuse 17 stories high someday.
But even the worst glass of Fort Bend County water is better than the best glass of Houston water. It would seem those inside-the-Loop folks don’t have quite everything going for them after all.
Most people around here, if they receive anything, get annual reports in the mail about their water supply, written in such gibberish that it might as well be in another language. Whatever you think of the New York Times, they through Duhigg’s work provided just about the whole country with a fine public service today, and in my opinion showed a bright glimmer of what journalism should be all about.
I’d drink to that, too, if I wasn’t afraid it would make me hurl.
→ B.Dunn, Dec 17, 2009, 07 51 am
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How Much Is That Doggy In The Window?
(Richmond • Fort Bend County)
Nice.
Today the New York Times gives Richmond, Texas, its 15 minutes of fame. And it looks like our little town now will be known far and wide as the home of the fabricated bloodhound scent lineup:
In several of the cases that were based on Deputy Pikett’s dogs, however, the scent lineups appear to have provided the primary evidence, even when contradictory evidence was readily available. Mr. Bickham spent eight months in jail after being identified in a scent lineup by Deputy Pikett’s dogs, until another man confessed to the killings. In an interview, Mr. Bickham scoffed at the accusation that he had taken part in three murders, noting that he has been hobbled by bone spurs and diabetes and is partially blind.Ronald Curtis, another Houston man jailed on the basis of Deputy Pikett’s dogs, was released from jail nine months after being accused of a string of burglaries. Store videos showed that the burglar did not resemble him. “Nobody was listening,” Mr. Curtis said.
Both he and Mr. Bickham are filing civil lawsuits over their treatment in federal court on Wednesday.
It won’t be the first time.
Over the past two years, I’ve reported on lawsuits filed in Victoria against dog handler Keith Pikett and Fort Bend County – here, and here, and here and here.
In one of those cases, law enforcement records allegedly show Pikett’s dogs followed the scent of a murder suspect (a former police captain later proved innocent when someone else confessed to the crime) “while supposedly riding in a car over 5.5 miles of roadway from the murder scene to his home.”
Pickett isn’t talking to the Times or anyone else about these cases now, but last year the bloodhound handler told me trained dogs such as his “do that all the time.”
In fact, Pikett said at the time that his dogs were working a capital murder case in Harris County “where we trailed a car for 38 miles – and we’ve already got two convictions.”
In the other Victoria case, police arrested a 42-year-old man and threw him in jail on charges of robbery and sexual assault, based on a scent lineup using Pikett’s dogs. DNA evidence later proved they had the wrong guy.
A spokesperson for The Innocence Project thinks there are other “wrong guys” out there still behind bars. This morning he told the Times, “Our estimate right now is we’ve got 15 to 20 people who are in prison right now based on virtually nothing but Pikett’s testimony. That’s a big problem.”
I am not a dog expert and continue to withhold judgment of Pikett’s performance or that of his dogs – although it has to be said that at this point, with this many innocent people surfacing after having been picked out in scent lineups, it doesn’t look good.
But I am curious right now about how much, in County Attorney’s Office man-hours and related legal costs, Fort Bend County is paying to defend Pikett in these cases, and how long they’re going to continue that defense.
→ B.Dunn, Nov 04, 2009, 04 10 am
