Oral History Interview

Interviewees: Wesley Cleveland and Eddie Weaver
Interviewer: Mark Olson
June 12, 2024

Mark O: Hello, welcome to Beneath the Surface. An oral history project of the Tarrant Regional Water District.

My name is Mark Olson, Senior Video Producer here at TRWD.

We are using this project to conduct interviews with long-term employees. To capture their thoughts, experiences, and insight covering their careers here at the water district.

Today is June 12, 2024. And for this interview we’re going to mix it up a bit. We have two guests whose careers intersected in the construction of the Integrated Pipeline from different angles. One from a construction management standpoint. And one from a technical design standpoint. Both serving roles crucial to bringing the project to life.

We’re talking about Wesley Cleveland and Eddie Weaver.

Wesley is a lifelong resident of Tarrant County. He started at the water district in 1991 and served the district with distinction in various management positions related to facilities design, construction, maintenance and operation. In his 27-year career here, Wesley played a key role in managing some huge construction projects, including the Benbrook Pipeline, Eagle Mountain Pipeline, pump station expansions at Waxahachie and Ennis, and ultimately the $2B Integrated Pipeline Project – before retiring in 2018.

Eddie started at the water district as a tyke out high school back in June 1974. In fact, today marks his 50th year anniversary working here. That is quite an accomplishment. Congratulations, Eddie.

Eddie stays silent.

Eddie’s career started in the welding shop. And from there his responsibilities just kept expanding… he worked up to construction inspection, construction management, pipeline systems operations and maintenance, systems automation, and engineering.

How did his career take a path that it did, you ask? One. Eddie couldn’t say ‘no’ to new opportunities. And two. He attended night school, earned his Associate, Bachelor, and Masters Degrees. And he’s still going, like the Energizer bunny, working on a doctorate in Systems Engineering from Colorado State University. The focus of that degree is on systems dynamic approach to regional water supply planning.

Currently, Eddie serves as the IPL Program Manager.

Gentlemen, welcome to you both. (Hello… thank you).

Obviously, we’re going to get to your roles on the Integrated Pipeline, but first let’s talk about your early roles at the water district to learn how you ended up working here and how things transitioned for each of you as your careers grew.

Wesly, let’s start with you…

Wesley C: I had a background in commercial construction. I had been running commercial projects, everywhere from jails to schools to grocery stores, big shopping centers. And I had been working – I’d gone to work for Associated Milk Producers, as a project manager for them, over a $22M milk production plant. And I was supposed to move to Roswell, NM to build another one. And then stay on as the plant engineer.

As time evolved by the moving was going to be a chore. I also worked on a project at the plant – the first plant – where we were doing wastewater treatment facilities. And I got interested in that. And I got to talking to a gentleman there for the City of Winnsboro. He made a suggestion that I needed to go back to school and work on an environmental engineering degree.

And I thought that’s a pretty big commitment at 41 years old with 4 kids, and two of them getting ready to start college. So, anyway I got to thinking about who do I know in the water business. Well, it turns out my youngest daughter had a really good friend called Meagan Oliver. Didn’t hardly know her dad other than he and I had gone to ballgames together. And watched the girls play. And visited some, but I knew he was working for some kind of water district. Knew nothing about it, hardly at all.

I thought, well, I’m going to go get his opinion. So, I invited him to breakfast. And was this something worth pursuing? And I had a resume with me. And I wasn’t even thinking about going to work for the water district. I was just looking; did it make sense to go back to college? What was the opportunities in environmental engineering?

Anyhow, we visited. Had great breakfast. He said, ‘well, let me have the resume and I’ll put it out with some different firms that I know, engineering firms.’ And he says, ‘see what kind of feedback.’

Well, anyway a couple of weeks went by. And again, my kids were beginning to, the idea of moving with one of them… We were originally going to move a year sooner. Now it ended up being a year later. And one was getting ready to be a senior in high school. Didn’t want to move and all that kind of stuff. Anyways. So, there was a pressure to not move.

So, anyway I called Jim back and asked him, would it be okay if I followed up with some of the firms that he had put my resume out with? And he says, ‘yeah, feel free.’ And he says, ‘but you know we were talking about you the other day. A group of us.’ And he says, ‘We think maybe you might have some skills and things that we could use. We’d like to meet with you.’

So, I had lunch with him and Alan Thomas. Had an interview with them. And after that, they wanted me to meet with David Marshall. So, I met with Dave. And when it was all said and done they offered me a job as construction manager working for Dave Marshall. Because they knew they had different projects coming up. The Benbrook project was in the design phase and whatever. So, that’s how I came to work for the district in October 1991 as a construction manager working for Dave Marshall in Engineering.

And to be quite candid, it took some adaption. Moving from the high pressure kick the door in, cuss a little bit construction world that I had been in, to the atmosphere of the water district, which obviously got political ramifications for any and everything they do, which means you don’t do a lot of things real quickly.

That took a little bit to get used to. And I would say that I spent two years working under Dave, learning the district, learn the system. Met Ed learning about the water systems and the whole thing. I did a couple of smaller projects, construction management projects. And then the Benbrook connection project fired up. And Ed and I worked together on it. He was – I don’t remember what your title was.

Eddie W: I was pipeline… Rod was still here. So, I was working for him. Assistant Pipeline Superintendent. I transitioned over from construction in ’87 to working in operations in ’87-’88 timeframe.

Wesley C: So, anyway. I had to learn to listen. And pay attention. And get opinions from the field people. The guys like Ed that actually had to make it run. And I began to recognize the need for the, you know, the engineering firm that was designing the projects really needed to hear from the field ops folks.

That did not happen before. So, I pushed for input from Mike Meza, from Ed, from different folks that were actually running the system to where they got to sit in on design meetings. And I think it had great effects on the Benbrook Connection. Because the engineer realized that, yeah, they built it for one way. But the people having to run it needed it to be another way. That was the first go around.

And then from there, I worked on various smaller projects, whatever, after we finished Benbrook Connection. Then, by the time we got to that point, I was moved over to operations – Western Division Operations Manager. But I still wore the hat of construction manager. And was still working with Ed and Mike on different projects. Smaller ones, whatever. And began to have a greater appreciation for how smart this man is.

So, anyhow, that’s where that happened. And that’s when we did the Eagle Mountain Connection Project. That’s when we did that one. We did reservoir rehab at Kennedale. Did several smaller projects. Not great big huge, but they were still pretty good sized projects. And then the pump stations.

Where Ed and I really worked together was when we got on the pump stations at Ennis.

Eddie W: High capacity.

Wesley C: Yeah, the high capacity.

Eddie W: R-C high capacity.

Mark O: Okay. Before we go further, let’s jump over to Eddie here. And Eddie, tell me a little bit about your story. So, you came to the water district right out of high school, working in a welding shop. And then your career just…

Eddie W: My older brother had worked here. And that’s how I knew about it. And I had been down here when we were across the river. And had met Gene Fruhwirth. Gene, you know, when you get old enough, come back.

So, at that point I kept coming back. And he kept saying, ‘well, we’ve raised the age. Insurance.’ So, finally after I graduated, I came my senior year. And said, ‘okay, I’m going to be 18, what’s your excuse now?’ And he said, ‘well, be here on whatever date once I got graduated and all.’ So, that’s how I came to be.

The first day here Rod had put me with Bob Baker. Bob Baker, we had an old Jeep truck and the job for that day was going to be go down the river and pick up trash. So, we started out. Nasty, nasty job. And I decided I’m not doing this. So, we went back at break time. And I was about done. And Rod came and got me. We’re sitting over there under the big oak tree. And he said, ‘do you know anything about welding?’ I said, ‘I had 4 years of metal shop in high school.’ He said, ‘come go with me… so I got in the truck. He drove me down to the old welding shop, which is now the stock room, and kicked me out with John and Kenneth Decker, and that’s how I got started.

So, they put me to work. They were building some water trucks and some other things. So, my job was to grind and polish all the welds and sweep the floors. So, it took me until the fall to win them over, you know. And then they call me up to the office one day, Gene did. ‘When are you going to go to school?’ And I said, ‘well, I really haven’t thought about it.’ And they said, ‘we’d like for you to stay on full-time.’ And I said, ‘I’ll go to school at night.’ And that’s how it started.

Mark O: Wow. So how long did you work in the welding shop?
Eddie W: From June to… I came on full-time would have been early September of that year, ’74.

Mark O: So, not really a big length of time.

Eddie W: No. 2-3 months.

Mark O: How did you transition from welding to the next piece of your journey?

Eddie W: I stayed in the welding shop and we did all kinds of projects. Whatever came up. Did a lot of maintenance work. Did a lot of fitting of equipment. Things like that.

Then in 1978, along in there. They were doing the Cedar Creek expansion. High-capacity expansion. And they were building the second cell out at Kennedale balancing reservoir. So, they needed an inspector out there. So, they loaded me up one day. Took me over there. Met Ward Meyers, Freese and Nichols Inspector, and Harold Johnson. I knew of Harold Johnson, but I had never met him before. And they said, ‘we want you to inspect on this job.’ So, here’s a set of plans. Here’s a spec book. Here’s a tape measure. Go to work.

So, that was my training. So, I sat there and I read all those specs. And I went through all those plans. And at the time, there had been an inspector there. He had left for reasons I don’t know. And they were, where the conduits go from the intake tower out to this cell 2, they were putting rebar up.

On the plans, it said number 5 bars, 6-inch centers both ways. 2 max. So, I went out there with my little tape measure. And I didn’t know that there were such things as tolerances in rebar. And so they were, it was off. Some maybe 4 ½ some maybe 7 1/2 . It wasn’t 6 x 6. And so I went all down through there checking. And I talked to the foreman, and I said, ‘well, you’re going to have to stop. Take all that out and put it back. You know here’s, showed him the plans.

Of course, he left. This was before cellphones and all. And directly here comes Harold Johnson and Ward Meyers and I don’t know who from Freese and Nichols. And they explained to me about tolerances. And so that was my, that was my first deal of construction inspection.

From there, they were building the high-capacity pump station at Ennis. So, they asked me to go down there and do all the welding inspection on all the pipe and ground storage tanks. They’re also building a tank at Waxahachie. So, I went back and forth doing that. And Bubba was the Inspector at Ennis. So, I did that work.

And then Harold. We were doing the electrical work at Waxahachie high capacity. And so he said, ‘well, I need you to take care of the electrical stuff. And this was all medium voltage, so again I was learning on the fly. And it just kind of went from there.
Got that done. Went back to the welding shop. And then ’83, when Richland-Chambers, the construction was going to start for that, Gene called me up to the office and said, ‘well, we want you to go do that. Will you live down there?’

At the time it was a tough decision, because Vicky was working at that time, at General Dynamics. Relly good job and all this other. So, we debated and prayed and all that other stuff. What do we do? What do we do? And she says, ‘well, you’re the bread winner. We’re going to go wherever you need to go.’ So, she left General Dynamics. Well, she had to finish out the year to get all her retirement benefits. So, I moved down there in September. We bought a mobile home. Put it on the site. She came after the end of the year. So, that’s how I ended up working for Harold Johnson direct on that one.

Mark O: So, let me ask you this. In your career path as you went along, it seems to me like a lot of this stuff was learn as you go. Did you have some people that took you under their wing to get you acclimated to some of this high-level stuff? Reading plans, and that kind of thing?

Starting out with John and Kenneth Decker. They were do it right. Pay attention to detail. Rod and Les same way. They also gave me a lot leeway as far as staying in bounds, but once you win their… especially John, it took me a while to win his trust over… but eventually it came. And so, that’s where, I don’t know if it’s part of it or not, but that’s where they would offer me or ask me to do something, and I would go do it. And it just kept going that way.

Harold was a different character. He was, he was – did you know Harold much?

Wesley C: Met him. That’s all. He was retiring right, he retired right before I came.

Eddie W: He was old, old-school construction, military. He was in, he was in the Navy in WWII and then when Korea started up, he went and enlisted in the Army and went to Korea.

But, anyway, so went to Richland. We bought the mobile home. Went down to Richland. And then, Lonnie Beyers, Bubba, and I were the engineering technicians on that job. And so we did all sorts of inspections, quality assurance. That type of thing. Working with, Freese and Nichols was the engineer. They had folks on the job on that.

Finished that up in 1987. And then they asked us to work in pipeline operations. So we moved from Richland over to Cedar Creek. And worked with Rod then operating the pipelines. Cedar Creek and Richland pipelines. And then in ’97, they asked me to come up and work for Dave.

Mark O: So, Wesley, you started under Dave’s wing and then (for a couple of years) and then you became Western…

Wesley C: Western Division Manager, which was over the floodway and Eagle Mountain and Benbrook (Bridgeport) Reservoir operations. I actually worked for Dave from October of ’91 until December of ’99. So, eight years. A little over 8 years I worked for Dave. And during that time we did the Benbrook Connection. We did the expansion at Kennedale Balancing Reservoir, or the relining, not the expansion, the relining of the reservoir.

Mark O: So, let’s talk a little bit about that Benbrook Pipeline. What did it accomplish?

Wesley C: The goal was to be able to use Benbrook as a terminal storage reservoir. We cut a deal with the Corps of Engineers to use it, where, just like we use Lake Arlington as a terminal storage reservoir, they wanted to use Benbrook as a terminal storage. The whole purpose of a terminal storage reservoir is, you can pump water up here in the wintertime cheaper than you can in the summertime. Plus, you’ve got the capacity in the pipeline to do it. They needed to be able to, whereas you store it in a lake that’s closer by, where you don’t have to pump it as far. Make sense? Saves electricity and power.

Anyway, that was the main drive originally, was to be able to use Benbrook Lake as a terminal storage capacity. And in the wintertime, we could pump it back to Rolling Hills. Though we were tying on at Rolling Hills, going over to Benbrook. Part of it was open cut. Four miles of it was a tunnel. During the summers when you needed additional capacity they could pump it back the other direction. That was the Benbrook line.

Mark O: So, let me ask you this. That was probably you’re first like major project.

Wesley C: Yes.

Mark O: Did you, was there any trepidation? Was there any like, ‘oh, boy, here we go?’

Wesley C: No. Not really. Because I mean I had been a… You gotta understand, if you’ve been a construction superintendent on the ground in commercial construction, you’ve been under a lot of pressure. And juggling a lot of different balls at the same time. And in some ways this was harder, in some ways it was easier because I had more help. It wasn’t just me, you know.

And of course, Freese and Nichols did a good job on the Benbrook connection in my opinion. And we got, that’s when I first got introduced to their construction management team of Robert Allen and Coy Veatch. As you begin to see the players that you’ve got helping you, it was just a matter of learning how to use them.

But during the design phase, I think was where Dave and I would be meeting with them. And I’d heard a lot of complaints from Ed and company, about why did they design… and Rod, you know. Yeah, they designed this but, you know, it may be easy to build, but it’s not easy to operate, you know. Or it may be cheap to build, but it’s tough to maintain. And I realized that we were not giving the engineering firm the feedback they needed during design. They knew about building one, but they didn’t know about operating it. Not on a long-term basis. I mean, yeah, they understood it to a point.

And at that point in time, our people knew more about running a pipeline than the engineering firm doing the designing of it. All of them. It wasn’t just Freese and Nichols just any. So, that’s when we pushed. But, to be honest with you, I don’t remember having any fear and trepidation. It was just another project. It’s just there was more zeroes at the end of the line, you know, as far as dollars wise than what I had done before. But, I had been over a $22M project prior to coming to work for the district, so…

I had training in that. And I had, I had a great mentor for 10 years in the construction business. And you talk about learning stuff. I didn’t know hardly anything when I went to work for him. And Ed’s heard me talk about him, but he was one of those kinds of people that I worked for and he kept me in over my head the whole time. And every now and then, he’d see I was floundering. And he’d reach down there and let me catch my breath and throw me back in. So, I learned a lot during those years working for him.

Like I said, the biggest problem I had working for the district was learning to shut up and listen. And listen to other people. And pay attention to, just ‘cause I thought it needed to be done that way doesn’t mean that’s the way it needs to be done. So, that was my first project. I guess what I’m saying is that’s where I did learn to listen instead of trying to kick the door in a cuss a little bit and let’s make this happen.

Mark O: Listening takes practice. For sure. And it’s a good skill to have. So, as a construction manager what are your daily responsibilities?

Wesley C: Well, there’s different terms of construction managers. I guess what I’m saying is that’s a broad term. The way it related to my role primarily was observing all the pieces as they were happening. Whether it be design, construction, contracts, contractors, landowners. All the pieces that it takes to bring one together.

A lot of times it wasn’t that I had so much to do, I had to just be looking out for problems. What’s coming? What could blow up in our face? Again, the day-to-day activities – it was a matter of going around and checking and seeing what was happening in order to stay in touch with our guys that were, our guys some of them out there inspecting, like Ed had done. Overseeing them. Working with the construction management team of Freese and Nichols, Robert Allen and Coy. Just making sure the day-to-day problems didn’t, something didn’t blow up in our face. Really more of coordinating and making sure everybody’s talking to one another. And everybody knows what’s happening. That was probably my role.

I was also still, during the Eagle Mountain Connection Project, I was still over operations. So, I was juggling two things. But I had good people on the Eagle Mountain Connection Project. So, it made it pretty easy. Does that make sense what I’m saying?

Mark O: Oh, heck yeah.

Wesley C: It was, it was more along the lines of, my job was to try to resolve issues as they came up. And problems. And put out the fires before they became a problem. And then look for possible places where it could get ugly. Let’s don’t go there.

Mark O: Right. Right. Okay, Eddie you were out at Richland-Chambers while that project was going on. When did you get drafted back here to this area? Or did you hang out there for a while?

Eddie W: Once it was operational we moved over to… Well, went to work for Rod operating on the pipeline. The Cedar Creek and Richland-Chambers pipeline. And then of course we had the Benbrook Connection that was going on. So all that was, you know from that ’87 timeframe. So, I was in day-to-day operations with Rod on Richland and Cedar Creek pipelines.

We were working through warranty issues, things like that, on the Richland-Chambers system, on the pump stations and pipeline, things like that. Getting everything started up, coordinating, training operators. All that kind of thing because their, their workload just doubled. Because at one time we had one system. Now we have two when Richland started up. And then we added Benbrook later. And then we added Eagle Mountain. So, all that was going on. So, I was working with Rod more on the, on the technical side of keeping those things going. Staffing, as far as you know, operators.

Along in there, we developed some other system, what ’89? We started, did the microwave system. Did the SCADA system. But we had to, we had to solve the valve, the valve timing problem. So, we worked on that. We had to balance flows. That’s where the VFD thing came in that we worked on.

Mark O: Okay. Let’s get a little deeper in that. The valve issues that you guys, and the VFD’s. Can you explain that?

Eddie W: At one time, when everything was going, we had a lot of overtime. And so the challenge came, what can we do to manage overtime? And so, they put me to work on that. We had to fix valve timing issues. Valve timing and consistency operation issues. And we needed a reliable communication system. And a control system to be able to go what we called at the time, “unattended.”

So, Rod limped with me on that, and said, ‘okay, go forth and do something.’ As luck would have it at the time, Norman had been working on the microwave system to connect Fort Worth and East Texas. So, worked with Norman and Jerry Young and they put in the first analog microwave system. Had 99 channels. We were going to use two for phone and fax.

So, we pirated one of those channels. Jerry and I worked with Lloyd Huffman and got some data paths going from Cedar Creek. Connected all the locations. So, we did that. That allowed us to now look at the remote, well it’s not really remote control. The term, we didn’t know it at the time, was Supervisory Control Data Acquisition System, which was SCADA. So, we ran some tests and things like that, where we could get connectivity to be able to control it.

Then we had to solve the valve timing issue. So, I developed an onboard PLC control thing that would allow us… We had… on the accumulators at the time, we had low pressure and valve… We had to have operators when you started and stopped to adjust the needle valves so the valves wouldn’t open or close too fast. Put that PLC system on there. Couldn’t control pressure or anything. But we could control time.

I went out and bought a PLC. $110. And we programmed it, Jerry and I and Bill Dang. Did the curve. Put it in there. Put it on a valve and got it going. Of course, all this was unsanctioned at the time. Nobody knew what was going on. But, Alan had said, ‘we got to do something about overtime.’ So, we had communication. We had valve timing. Then we had to do something with the flow control.

At the time I was working on my Masters. And so my Masters thesis was on the VFD’s. And so I did all that and that became the justification to put the first drives at, at Waxahachie, which would allow us to balance flow in the system without throttling valves.

Mark O: VFD is short for?

Eddie W: Variable Frequency Drive. It allows you to… it’s like a dimmer switch on a large scale. So, that gave us the ability now to regulate flow. We had communication. We had the valve timing issue figured out. So, that became the initial basis to go forward. We did the research. Got with Dave. Said okay, Dave, we can do this now. We met with some other customer cities and things like that. And investigated all these different kind of control systems. And put all that proposal together. Pitched it to management and the board. And they said, ‘yeah, go forth and do that.’

We went and got the system. The company was in California. We went out there. We developed all the control logic. They helped us program it. Put it in. We set it all up at the factory. Tested it. Shipped it all back. And we did all the installation ourselves, as far as wiring it all up and everything.

And then once we got it going, we ran it for a couple of years with operators in the system to prove it all out with the drives and communication. All of our controls. Did some power failure, stuff like that. And once we did that, and that was along somewhere between ’87 and ’90, we were developing all that and got it going. So, at that point we were able to go unattended, as far as having operators at all the locations. So, that was my venture into that.
Of course, part of that was when I was going to school too. Like say the VFD thing was on my master’s program. So, I had some dual incentive there. Get it done. But I got basically paid to do the master’s thesis. So…

Mark O: Must have been one heck of a thesis for sure.

Eddie W: So anyways, that’s how we got that. Then as the system expanded as we went on to Benbrook and Eagle Mountain, we just copied that along if you would.

Wesley C: And I think, at least my observation, when he was doing this I was just coming on board. And I didn’t even know how to turn a computer on hardly when I came to work for Dave Marshall. And again, having been in the field in construction, that was prior to using computers out in the field. And so, at least my observation at this time, was that Ed and Dave saw the future of automation, should I say, somewhat the same. And together. And he was in operations. Dave was in engineering and pushing for a lot of the same things Ed was pushing for in the field.

Eddie W: Yeah. I need to add that Dave gave all of my crazy ideas, made them valid, credibility. Because once Dave would agree then that gave a comfort factor to management that, okay he’s not really crazy. He knows what he’s doing. But, Dave gets a lot of credit for basically – I don’t know if selling is the right word – but providing that comfort to management. Because all this was new. I mean, it was…

Wesley C: I don’t know that it was cutting edge, but it was close.

Eddie W: Well, way back early on when they first turned, put the Cedar Creek line on, they had a control system. They had laid cable the whole length of the pipeline. In Fort Worth they had a control center. Nice big display board. Computers and everything for the – this is in the late ‘70’s. The problem was, I think the software and hardware were solid, the problem was the communication. That, that cable that had been buried in the ditch, every 1,000 feet or so it had to come up to a pedestal. Be spliced. And another 1,000 feet all the way from Cedar Creek up here to the office.

And it was the moisture and insects that got in those pedestals, and it was just notorious. Communication just wasn’t very solid. The control part was, but the communication from all the remote sites was never good. Well, it was never solid. Now the voice thing worked really well. They just had what they called the straight line and you just picked it up and anybody could talk on it. Every location had the bat phone. You could go from that.

But, every time it would rain, or if the cable, the cable was supposed to be laid in the bottom of the pipe. They laid, put that, then laid the pipe on top of it. But, everywhere it came up to the pedestals, it had to come up to a different depth. Farmer would go through there sometimes really close to that pedestal and you get all these little pieces of cable turning up when he plowed. So we were always, and every time you spliced it you lost impedance or whatever in the cable. You have this background noise all the time. That was one thing that never let the automation take off. But when we got the microwave, the microwave was solid. And that’s what really allowed us to, to take that step.

Mark O: Alright, well we’re going to have to fast forward here and talk a little bit about the integrated pipeline. So, Wesley I know this was a long time on the planning side of things, but what was your role in making that project come to life?

Wesley C: First off, Ed and I learned to work very closely together on the Eagle Mountain Connection project. Okay. And I began to realize first off that God did not bless me with a math and science gene. He did bless this man with the math and science gene. And at the same time, we both shared having come up through the mud. That we had in common. We just did it, did it in different ways. But, we both, both knew what it was to come early, stay late. We both knew what it was to have dirty fingernails and muddy boots. And we shared that. The difference was, mine was more along the lines of learning how to motivate people. How to focus people. Where Ed was clearly so much stronger technically than me.

But also during the Eagle Mountain Connection he and I learned to, should I say, I guess rely and trust one another. One of the things as a construction superintendent, you didn’t have to know how to do anything. There was a lot of stuff that you might be overseeing that you might not really know how to do. But, you had to know enough about it to know whether somebody is b.s.’n you. You had to know enough about it to know whether somebody was taking you down the wrong path.

Ed was good about helping me understand that on the technical side. You know, well they’re wanting to do this, but this isn’t going to work. That doesn’t make… But, at the same time, I took the pressure off of him, allowed him to focus on that. And I would deal with the people side of it. Telling them, ‘no, we’re not going there,’ you know. And, or ‘we’re going to do it this way’ or whatever. We had learned to do that together on the Eagle Mountain Connection project.

Of course, I was still over operations in Fort Worth. But I had, we did the Eagle Mountain Connection, I guess we finished it in about ’08. I think it was about ’08.

Mark O: I believe that’s true.

Wesly C: Ed had actually been working on the IPL lots longer than I had. From the development stage of the concept, the plans, the future. He was way far ahead of me on that. But since we had, I guess because Eagle Mountain Connection project had worked so well, and it did it went very well. We finished it on time and under budget. All that kind of stuff. Dave and Alan, who were the two driving forces, decided let’s keep this team the way it was as we go into IPL.

So, I was actually learning from Ed really more than anything about IPL and what it needed to do at that point in time. And this was in about ’09. And it was decided that I would be the program manager. He was going to head up the technical. I was going to head up the administrative side of it you might say.

Eddie W: Yeah the money. (laughter) They won’t put me in charge of money for some reason.

Wesley C: Anyway, at that point in time our instructions to Ed and I both, at this point he and I were used to working with each other, and we sat and visited and talked and where are we going? And it was laid out to us at that time (correct me if I’m wrong Ed) the state planning deal was saying we needed to have this thing finished by 2018. And this is…

Eddie W: Yeah, the Region C, Dallas and TRWD demands were… this is how it initiated. The planning was showing that…

Wesley C: But this was a high level planning…

Eddie W: Yeah, they had water in Palestine. We had water in Cedar Creek. We needed it to meet demands about the same time. And so working through that, that’s where this integrated pipeline idea got hatched. Dallas had their plan to bring Palestine. We had our plan to bring Cedar Creek. That right there, working through the Region C group, Dave and his counterpart over at Dallas – you know there may be some economy here because of timing and everything to do one line instead of two. So, that’s how the whole concept got started before it ever got to Wesley and I.

Wesley C: But, where it went from there was though, there was this sense of urgency that we’ve got to get this thing done by 2018. We’re talking about the whole thing. I’m talking about what Ed’s still working on right now was supposed to be done by 2018.

Eddie W: Palestine to Benbrook.

Wesley C: That was what…

Mark O: No pressure.

Wesley C: Yeah. And Alan looked at me and Dave, and they said, ‘can we do it?’ And I said, ‘yeah, we can do it. Briing money! Bring lots of money.’ But Ed and I can do it. But it’s going to take money.

And the politics that were going on related to our partnership with Dallas and the whole thing required us to broaden who we did business with in the design phase. We couldn’t just stay focused on a couple of firms that we’d been used to using. We were going to have to broaden out a whole bunch of different firms.

The other side of it was, we obviously, Ed and I couldn’t just do it, the two of us like we had. And on the Eagle Mountain Connection we had one engineer and one construction manager. That was Freese and Nichols. That wasn’t going to be able to be feasible on the IPL.

So, the decision was made to bring in an outside program management firm, which was… I don’t know whether it was a new concept, but it was new to me.

Eddie W: It was new to TRWD. And Dallas.

Wesley C: And a program management firm to help us manage this plethora of engineering firms that we were going to have to do business with. And the whole thing. Because if we were going to get it done in this 9-year timeframe, that includes getting right of way. Permits and right of way. And we knew we didn’t have the staff to do that by any stretch of the imagination. So, the decision was made, and we went out for proposals for engineering firms to act as the program management firm. And that was in late 2009. We awarded I think in 2010. R.W. Beck. And they brought on a project management team. And really my role was strictly to try to make sure they didn’t get out of control.

That’s really all I was supposed to do was really just try to shepherd them, you know, on how we did the thing and observe what they were doing. And Ed’s role was to shepherd them on the design. On the technical side.

Somewhere in about 2010, towards the end of 2010, and we did bring on some new players that had some complicated matters should we say. But, did help point out some things. Even though they complicated it, they also helped me see some things we needed to do differently.

There was two design meetings, or two things that we had been forced on this thing of we got to get it to Benbrook. We got to get it to Benbrook by 2018. We got to tie into Palestine. Dallas rose up and says, ‘no, you don’t. We don’t, we’ve got it. You don’t have to tie into Palestine yet.’ They disagreed with the big plan. Well, they have the right to disagree. It was their money that was going to be spent there. That was one thing.

The other thing was, we definitely had a need for getting additional water up here through the pipeline. That our two pipelines wouldn’t, the existing lines couldn’t handle. Ed and I, if I remember, we were sitting there in his office, and he says, ‘you know, we could just tie into the R-C line, the existing line, and tie it into the IPL.’ Ed said, ‘if we tie in there, we can buy ourselves several years.’ He says, ‘we can pump water from R-C into the IPL and we can buy ourselves several years of meeting what we need.’

So, all of a sudden Dallas is not saying, we don’t need to do over to Palestine until several years later. Ed comes up with this other way. And then I remember in a design meeting with Alan Hudson, from Freese and Nichols, and he looked at it and he says, ‘you know, you can delay the Benbrook Pipeline if you just build a leg from there to there… (referencing map on the wall). You don’t have to build the additional Benbrook Pipeline. All of a sudden when you took into account doing it these ways, we bought ourselves a lot of time. We only had to build 2/3s of the line instead of the whole thing by 2018. Made a huge difference.

Eddie W: Yeah. We built, initially we built from the R-C Pipeline IPL Interconnect up to the 2 x 12 interconnect, which is, that’s us. Get that water, more water with the JB3 Booster Pump Station at Midlothian Balancing Reservoir. So that let’s us get more water out of the existing system. The pipe had more capacity. So, the people listening couldn’t see that…

Wesley C: Yeah, you might have to film that map. I don’t know. In other words, what had been an overall project, we’re still doing the overall project, and Ed’s working on it. But, in other words, instead of by 2018, we now had until 2028 to get it all done. So, that made a difference.

Now all of a sudden, we’ve got this huge geared up staff of outside engineering folks from R-W Beck. And all of a sudden, we really don’t quite need all this help. And again, some of the outside input that had been brought in, we needed to start pairing back. Because we were spending a lot of money in a hurry.

And so the toughest part was beginning to dismantle, should is say, this infrastructure of staff that the outside program manager had brought in. And choosing, who were the best players to keep and who do we need to set aside. That started happening in 2011. And it didn’t quite get totally completed until 2014, by the time we finally got the team, in my opinion, where it was clicking.

Eddie W: But what we did do is from Palestine all the way over, up to Benbrook, we obtained the alignment. So, all those firms did the preliminary design as far as the route, so that we could go get the right of way. So that, the right of way is secure from Palestine all the way up to Benbrook now for the Integrated Pipeline.

So, once that preliminary work was done, those designs were paused there. They’re on the shelf as far as alignment. And then we can pick back up. All the standards were developed. Standard specifications for pipe, for pumps, motors, drives, transformers. All that kind of stuff. All that work is already done that all those teams did. And all that’s ready to go. So we standardized everything across the board.

That was a big challenge because every design engineer that came in had their, their standard way of doing it. This is where Dave and Wesley both turned me loose and here’s the standards we’re going to go by. That was all based on the lessons learned of we’re not doing it this way because, or we can do this. So, that was a challenge for all those engineering firms to accept that. Because everybody’s got their way of doing it. At one time we had 11 or 12 design firms. Each with their own standards. From an O&M point of view it didn’t make sense because everything would be different. So…

Mark O: So, you standardized the standards that you were asking these firms to meet. What kind of standards are we talking about?

Eddie W: Well, it could be on the pipe design. All these engineers were party to it. But pipe design. Wall thickness. Backfill. I mean everybody’s got an opinion. Pipe design – steel vs. prestressed. You know, those kinds of things. When you get to the pump stations there’s a lot of moving parts. Well, here’s our design for a pump station. Well, no, based on our lessons learned, this is what it’s going to be like. We want this kind of control valve. We want VFDs on everything. There’s any number of things that we’ve developed over the years that have become our standards. TRWD standards. That’s what we want.

We have six pump stations. You didn’t want six different designs coming in from an O&M point of view that you’re going to inherit. So that’s where we – boosters are this way, lakes are this way, interconnects are this way. So, we standardized all that. So, from an O&M point of view, not really what the designers wanted to bring. They came around. I mean it was, you know…

Mark O: Took a little time. A little convincing.

Eddie W: Well, I mean they have, they have a lot of years of the way they do things. And I understand that. But, I don’t want you to start with a blank sheet of paper. Here’s something. Adapt this. And that’s basically what it was.

Wesley C: Meanwhile, I would say that my role was… the problem with engineering firms. When you’re dealing with contractors, you really don’t have to push contractors to hurry in most cases. Time is money to them. If anything, you’re having to slow them down to make them do it right. Okay? Engineering firms, on the other thing, are always looking for another way to do it. Let’s recalculate this. Let’s do this. Let’s study this a little bit more.

I spent most of my time trying to kick them out of the weeds, with Ed’s help. And again, there were hard conversations that had to be had related… we don’t need this person working on this anymore… this firm’s not performing, or this sub or whatever. There was a lot of hard conversations with personnel.

And one of the things Ed and I realized, too. We had divided this thing up into design sections, which also meant we could divide it up into construction sections. And everybody was trying to, where are we going to start? Well, we decided that we were going to start with whoever got finished with design first on the first section. We had it designed where we could tie each one of them in. And it was just a matter of designing your contracts where it was clear who did what at the tie-in. So, we just made up our mind, whoever gets the first area designed, and whichever section got the right of way bought first, that’s where we would start. That’s what happened. And again, we, we pushed hard.

There came a point there where Ed and I were saying, ‘No, we’re going to start on this day. We’re going to turn, we’re going to turn, get finished. We get the right of way, and Steve Christian and his group did a great job of getting stuff out in front. But they realized that all we got to do is buy this section first. And then we’ll start the next section wherever you get the right of way bought ahead of time. And so, we had it working in different sections. And that’s how we were able to meet schedule, you might say. By going on and starting areas while we were still working on other areas in design.

Mark O: Some keen flexibility going on there.

Wesley C: I guess you could say that, yeah.

Eddie W: Well, everything fit together. If this one was starting in the middle, that just meant that, okay, I have to have a connection here and I have to have a connection here. And whoever is second is responsible for making that tie-in. But other than that, it’s the same work. This guy has an extra butt strap. And this guy over here will have a butt strap. You know, when they tie on. But other than that, their work is independent.

Think of the transcontinental railroad. You know, they built… the golden spike thing. Where is that in Utah? That’s what we had going.

Wesley C: Only we had it in about five different sections.

Eddie W: Same thing. Each contract, other than that closure, was its own contract with its own physical limits to work in.

Mark O: Wild. So, in addition to providing more capacity to bring more water to the Metroplex, for both Dallas and us, City of Fort Worth, what are some other key features that this pipeline helps the water district accomplish?

Eddie W: Well, one thing that we went into – the whole sustainability initiative – is the right word. We were looking at life cycle costs, not just capital costs. That’s where, when we selected pipe size, when we said we want all VFDs. That thing right there, those two things on pipe diameter, velocity, VFDs, energy. I think there was a, right at a billion dollars in life cycle cost savings in some of those initiatives that we took. With just those two items right there – to manage energy and velocity in the pipe.

Wesley C: Kind of like when you are considering buying a refrigerator. You can buy a cheaper one. But, it’s going to use lots more electricity and it’s actually going to wear out faster. You can buy it for $300 or you can buy one for $1,000 or $2,000, that’s going to take a whole lot less electricity and it’s going to last twice as long. That’s life cycle cost. In other words, when it’s all said and done, you’re cheaper over the course of time. If that makes sense.

Eddie W: A little bit bigger pipe reduces the pressure, which that equates to less kW, less kWh. You got to find that, that right diameter. You can go too big, or you can go too small. But that’s where we worked on that to come up with what’s the optimum size to get that balance of power cost to pipe construction cost. That kind of thing.

We did a lot of that on the sustainability front. And then all VFDs was another sustainability thing that there’s a payout on that. And there’s also the O&M feature of starts and stops on motors. Things like that.

Liquid cooled motors. We learned that water cooled motors after we went through, what was it, 2011-2015 drought. We had motors that were running right on the edge. Not being able to run cool enough. Were going to… close to tripping off. So everything on Integrated Pipeline, we went with liquid cooled motors. And we also raised the service factor. That added capital costs to that equipment, but it extended the reliability. When that happens again, we’re not going to be as much as risk of not being able to run because of temperature.

And so all those things started coming into play. It drove the capital cost up, but there was a life cycle payback on it. So, we looked at that kind of thing. And that sustainability initiative, I think we got the platinum award for a lot of the stuff we did on coatings and efficiency, cooling. You know, all those kinds of things came into play on that. Those were opportunities that we took on Integrated Pipeline, looking into the future. On, when they said, ‘okay, we want a 100-year life out of this.’

When you start working backwards from there, that goes into things like liner thickness because of wear on the pipe. You know, the liner inside the pipe. Energy. You know, all those things come into play now. When you say, ‘I want this efficiency or this life for 100-years.’ That adds some capital cost but there’s, there is a payback on it.

Mark O: Right. It’s like putting the money up front, investing, so that you’re anticipating the future problems, or things that may pop up in the future that now, because you invested all this money up front, you don’t have to deal with it. Or you will deal with less problems in the future because of the way you…

Wesley C: Maintenance never goes away, but you can reduce it. And you can mitigate it lots better by how you build it in the front end.

Mark O: That’s an incredible project. And getting to watch it all come together and see it. Like you said, you started off initially, like we’re going to do it in this time. And now that you’ve been given some breathing room, just watching it come together and actually make a difference today is incredible.

Wesley C: And that does, the fact that we had the breathing room reduced costs. Because speed cost money. You know. Especially in construction. Fast cost money. One other thing that I might interject here, Ed can correct me if I’m wrong, but apparently I’d already retired, but I was talking to Darrel Beason, who is over operations now, and he was telling me that when we had, what was it in 2021 that we had that “snowmegeddon” thing, that if we hadn’t have had Midlothian Balancing Reservoir online and full, we would have been in real trouble. On because of the power. They couldn’t pump water as much as they wanted to during that time. And the fact that we had brought IPL online, on time, and had that first phase built, we survived that bad, bad winter storm without real incident, should we say.

Mark O: I think what happened was that there were a ton of pipeline breaks that kicked our demands into high gear, which you wouldn’t expect during the wintertime. So…

Eddie W: Well, it had to do with City of Fort Worth has a lot of ductile and cast-iron pipe in a lot of their system. And they started, those lines started, when the ground moving, they started breaking. That kind of thing, which makes our – send more water, send more water.

Midlothian Balancing Reservoir. That’s 450 million gallons sitting up there that can provide that pressure to those treatment plants so they can, they can keep going. Then we had that, the winters two years in a row. The second year wasn’t as bad as the first year, but I mean… So, that helped Fort Worth, especially get through those two storms.

Mark O: Wild. I know we could probably talk about this a little longer, but let’s move on to wrapping this up. And Wesley, you spent a long time here at the water district, more than a majority of people, so what are some of the things that, that you might want to share with some of the other folks, maybe who are just getting started? Some Wisdom. Some of the things you learned along the way. Just help other people. Encourage other people.

Wesley C: Obviously, learning to listen to other folks and appreciating their concerns and their needs in different departments. Teamwork is incredibly important. And good communications during the team – good teams understand and know what the other, the other players are going to do and think. So, you get there by listening. You also get there by doing your part. In other words, you got to expect somebody to hold up their end. At the same time, why you got to hold up your end.

And that means if you say you’re going to get something done by a certain time, you get it done by that time. I think that’s an important concept that a lot of people… it’s easy to, easy to not remember, should I say.

The other thing is I guess, and I don’t know, you probably want to edit this out, but in my opinion one of the things that you struggle with working for a public entity is you don’t have profit as a motive. Profit is a big driver in private industry. Obviously if you don’t make a profit you don’t survive. You can’t keep the doors open. Whereas that’s not necessarily true in the public, public sector.

You need a whole lot of people like Mr. Weaver that are highly motivated to do it right and do it quickly. And do it on time. And get there without profit being the motive. They do it because it’s the right thing to do, and the hard thing to do. And it’s hard for a lot of people in a public entity to remember that. At least that’s my observation. It’s real easy, well we’ll get around to that tomorrow. Well, that wasn’t ever his position. And that’s my observation. Like I said, you may need to edit that out.

Eddie W: I’m going to look at it from the opposite way. I think it was Warren Buffet who said, ‘price is what you pay, value is what you get.’ When I started way back, taking some of this stuff over and what was, what was built and why, the low bid is not always the way to go.

And one thing that we have established here is the competitive sealed proposals, which allows us to take best value, not cheapest cost. That has been, in my part of the career, a big game changer, being able to address what Wesley is saying, ‘get what we need.’ If you want robustness, if you want reliability, resiliency… A lot of people use those words interchangeably. But, you know, you’ve got to know what is your target? What is your mission? And design and build to that.

It’s a mindset thing, because I inherited a bunch of stuff that were low bid at all cost. And we, we paid for that over time. At the time it was low capital cost, but O&M efficiency wasn’t there. The maintenance was hard to do. Access. All these things that, when you’re looking at it on paper and designing it, it’s one thing. But when you’re out there, when you literally don’t have room to work in something to turn a wrench, that kind of stuff. It negates all those “I got it for this much, but I’m going to spend more now to take care of it.”

Wesley C: And you can’t run it if it’s in the shop. Reliability is huge. And, like I say, I became very well aware of that working with Ed. We were getting where we were having more and more pipeline breaks, and yet Fort Worth was needing more and more reliability. Well, if you’re working on a downed pipeline, you can’t be sending them water. And so low bid and low capital cost on the front end will come back to haunt you.

Eddie W: You know in public type organizations like us, you know we’re tax based and revenue based on two different sides of the house. And we have, we have to manage that money. But, at the same time you’ve got to provide that reliable, uninterrupted service.

It’s a balancing act , but sometimes it’s a tough sell on, on, yeah I’m going to spend 10-percent more on the front. When you’re talking billions of dollars, that’s a lot of money. Okay, you’re looking at, at the worst time, let’s take, let’s take 2011. Let’s take 1980, 1996. And then the two winter storms back-to-back. That’s what you have to build to, because that’s when you need your reliability.

That’s a, I don’t know if battle is the right word, tug of war. Because, you know, you don’t want a gold plate, but you don’t want cast iron either. So, you kind of fight that battle. That’s kind of where I guess I get my most stress. Okay, y’all tell me what you want and there’s going to be a price associated with that. So, when the price comes in don’t, don’t back up from it or try cutting it. Or you know that kind of thing.

We did have one project one time on the Richland high capacity booster station at Waxahachie. The bids came in and was more than we had. The bids came in higher than the budget, the bottomline. And so, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? And we had all that cooling and everything. To redesign it and put it outside was going to drive the cost up. And we were under the gun to get water and all this other stuff.

So I came up with, I was looking at it one day and looking at the profile, and we had all this headroom in the, in the top of that drive room. And I said, ‘well, let’s put all the cooling in the headspace. And it worked. That’s what we did. But the tradeoff was O&M on it is a pain. You know, to get stuff in and out is going to have to go through the roof someday. But, it kept it on schedule. So, you have to sometimes make those kinds of adjustments on the fly. But it kept it going. Every time they go on and work on it, they cuss me still. But, it kept the project on track.

Mark O: Awesome. Well gentlemen, I think that’s going to, to wrap up this edition of Beneath the Surface oral history project. I just want to say, ‘Thank you Wesley for coming in out of retirement. For going to bat one more time. And Eddie, congratulations on 50 years.

Eddie W: Well, thank you.

Mark O: That’s incredible.

Eddie W: I’be been here half the time. (laughter). That doesn’t sound right. I’ve been here half the life of TRWD. How about that?

Mark O: There you go. Okay. That makes better sense.

Wesley C: This is the 100-year, isn’t it? That’s the reason we’re doing this, isn’t it? I can remember when with did the 75th celebration.

Eddie W: You know, I just, I wake up every day. I do what I do. And it doesn’t seem like 50-years has gone by since I drove in the gate over there.

Wesley C: You asked me a question of ‘what to share with current employees?’ Be an Ed Weaver.

Eddie W: Well, I appreciate that.

Wesley C: I’m just saying. Be an Ed Weaver. He’s not perfect. Don’t misunderstand. But, I’m talking about the drive. The drive and the hard work.

Eddie W: I have been fortunate enough to, to work for people that would give me that latitude to take something and go. And every now and then, they’d pull reign on me. But, like Harold Johnson told me the first day I was down there, you know. What do you want me to do? He said, ‘Well, you do anything you’re big enough to do, but if the job gets screwed up, you’re fired.’ That’s been a blessing and a curse because that, that caused some head buttings over the years.

Wesley C: Yep. Thank you, Mark.

Mark O: Alright. Thanks, Wesley. Thanks Eddie.

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