Dale White
(April 1969 – present)
If you know Dale White, you might describe him as a jack of all trades. And if you don’t know Dale, you’re missing out. He began his career at the Water District in April 1969 after leaving his job as a machinist at General Dynamics. He started out mowing right of ways and parks around Eagle Mountain and Marine Creek lakes. From there he branched into working in the mechanic shop fixing whatever came his way and learning all he could about the water district. Dale was instrumental in setting up and maintaining our stream and rain gage system to monitor floods. He also had a crucial role in the installation of the cathodic protection system on our Cedar Creek and Richland Chambers pipelines. After working 46 years fulltime, Dale transitioned into a part-time position. And the learning hasn’t stopped…
Oral History Interview
Interviewee: Dale White
Interviewer: Mark Olson
November 7, 2024
Mark O: Hello. It’s time for another edition of Beneath the Surface, an oral history project of the Tarrant Regional Water District. If you’ve heard any of the previous episodes, you know this is where we get to spend some time with long term TRWD employees who have spent their careers here at the water district.
My name is Mark Olson, senior video producer here at TRWD. Today is Thursday, November 7th, 2024. Our guest for this episode is Dale White. Dale started working here in April 1969. Back when we were known as the Tarrant County Water Control and Improvement District Number One. His first role was working for Wayne Applewhite mowing right of ways and parks around Eagle Mountain and Marine Creek Lake.
Within a few months, he was transferred to Fort Worth Operations Department to work in the mechanic shop, fixing trucks, tractors, pickups, and pumps.
In 1970, he added driving dump trucks and heavy equipment repairs to his list of duties. And even filled in on a bulldozer when one of the operators was on vacation.
In 1971, he started running a dragline, which is a large excavator that uses a bucket attached to a boom by cables to move dirt, rock, and other materials.
By 1982, he was back in the shop, working on heavy equipment and developing a record of equipment maintenance.
In 1985, Western Division Manager Mike Meza created a position for Dale as equipment maintenance supervisor. He also spent a lot of time in East Texas, overseeing maintenance of the equipment used in the construction of Richland Chambers Reservoir and the pipeline.
By 1990, David Marshall was getting an engineering department off the ground, and Dale was recruited to begin installing rain and stream gauges on the West Fork of the Trinity River and surrounding area.
David also became interested in a project Dale was trying to get off the ground himself – cathodic protection on our pipelines. During the next 25 years, he stayed busy overseeing equipment maintenance as needed, rain gauge installation and maintenance, and the installation and maintenance of cathodic protection system for our pipelines.
He transitioned from full time to part time in 2015, after working 46 years full time here at the district.
Even now, being part time, he still gets calls inquiring about his knowledge or experience with district equipment.
Hey, Dale. Welcome to the show.
Dale W: Thank you.
Mark O: All right. I know I’ve just shared a lot, and I’m guessing that just scratches the surface of everything you’ve been involved with. So, let’s dive in and I kind of want to get a little bit of background about where you were before you started working at the district. Did you grow up in this area?
Dale W: I grew up south of Azle, attended a small school, country school, two-room, called Bluff Springs ‘til the seventh grade. Then I went to Lake Worth for two years and then Azle for three years, where I graduated in 1964. I was part of the generation called the Baby boomers. And when I graduated, there wasn’t many job openings. That’s when JFK initiated the Manpower Training Act, which gave us training beyond school, high school.
So, I went and became a machinist, studied to be a machinist. After that, got a job at General Dynamics and worked there for three years. And that was long enough to show me that I didn’t like working inside a building. And I went to looking for other alternatives. And water district was on the top of the list. Better known as the water Board at that time.
So I went to work there in early spring of ‘69. And I worked, I did, I mowed right of ways and parks around the lake. The first 2 or 3 months I was with Earl Thomas, which is Alan Thomas’ dad. He was my supervisor, field supervisor at that time, and showed me all the parks and what needed done.
So, come summertime, then the schoolboys came in. We, they call them seasonal help now. But they were actually schoolboys back at that time that worked during the summer. They helped with the maintenance around the lake and whatnot. So come September 1st, all of the schoolboys went back to school and nobody stayed at Eagle Mountain at that time, except Wayne Applewhite. There was nobody stayed during the winter, unlike now.
So, I transferred to Fort Worth. And there was probably about 25 people in Fort Worth at that time, total. So, I was in a mechanic shop, but like I say, I worked on trucks, cars and tractors and pumps and, and other things.
Then, at that time we were all required to have a CDL, which was called a commercial driver’s license at that time. Well, I got my CDL in a pickup. I didn’t have to drive a big semi, or anything to get the license.
So, started driving dump trucks some, running smaller equipment. And I did get to run a bulldozer some, loader, track loader, some. And, just worked from there.
Then in 1971, I think it was, they bought a dragline to clean out sandbars and reshape river channel and whatnot there in Fort Worth. So, I started running it. And stayed on it for about 12 years. It was not a a full-time position. When it started getting Fall time – rain, wet weather, couldn’t get around in a dragline; it was truck mounted.
So, I went back into shop working on equipment, helping in a welding shop. That’s when I started getting experience on equipment, equipment other than rolling stock. The valves in the valve house, the spillway gates – maintenance on those.
I became very informed on the 48-inch valves in Bridgeport and Eagle Mountain Lake. And that’s what I get a lot of calls on these days. Because those valves were put in originally in 1958, and have required quite a bit of maintenance since then.
Mark O: So, hold on. So, what are these valves? Where…?
Dale W: The valves are discharge. We are… the water district is flood control and water supply to the city of Fort Worth. So, we have to have a way of discharging water down the river, down from Bridgeport to Eagle Mountain. From Eagle Mountain to Lake Worth. And these valves are how we meter the water that we deliver downstream.
Mark O: So, they they help with the gates and how they open, how far they open and close and all that stuff?
Dale W: Yeah. That’s all done. That’s part of stream gauge measurements (that I got into later) of how much water was flowing down the river.
So, okay,1982. Was working back in the shop. Okay, in 1985, then Mike Meza… let’s back up on that. Okay.
1982, when I went back into the shop, doing maintenance, Gene Fruhwirth promoted me to Shop Supervisor. And also charged me to start a maintenance record on equipment, rolling stock equipment. Because, at that time, there was no actual written record to follow a piece of equipment.
I got the job of doing it because I could read Ray Sales writing. He was in the stock room. The stock, the purchases is how records were kept back then. Parts purchases. So, I could read, Ray Sales writing. My writing’s so bad. And that’s how I got the job.
So, I started the maintenance record on the pieces of equipment then. So, I stayed in the shop until about 1985. Well, during that period of time, I think between ‘82 and ‘85, Mike Meza became in charge of Western Division Manager at that time. And he created position for me as Equipment Maintenance Supervisor, which covered all the district equipment, rolling stock and otherwise.
In doing so, then I got to start traveling the district more and learning more about spillways and rain gauges and stream gauges, pipelines. This, that, and the other. And I spent a lot of time during Richland construction on the pipeline itself. And worked in my other duties at that time also.
Mark O: So, so what were you doing while you were on the Richland pipeline stuff?
Dale W: Basically, learning the right of way. Learning the right of way, learning construction techniques, acting as an inspector a lot. Because there weren’t a lot of inspectors – there weren’t any district inspectors out there. During Cedar Creek and Richland pipeline construction they were Freese and Nichols hired inspectors.
I was kind of behind-the-scenes inspector also. But I was learning a lot about the right of way, which helped out years later.
The cathodic protection part started way back in, I’m going to say in the early ‘70s. I met a group of cathodic protection professionals that were doing a study on Cedar Creek pipeline before Richland.
in doing so, one of the fellows that I met was named Gerald Harless. And he took care of all the cathodic protection for Freese and Nichols in the water district.
So, I met him at Eagle Mountain Lake and he explained the catholic protection system that was at Eagle Mountain Lake and, and also Bridgeport Lake that was in operation at that time.
Mark O: Okay. So let’s back up a little bit. What exactly does the cathodic protection system do? For those of us who are like complete novices, explain it on a level where we can all understand.
Dale W: Okay. Corrosion… in metal there are grains of metal. In a piece of metal there are grains of metal just like grains of sand. And each one of those grains of sand have a different voltage potential. Metal has a voltage potential of 1.5 volts. No 0.15 volts.
Mark O: Okay.
Dale W: Okay. And if they’re sitting beside each other, it’s kind of like when you have a dead battery and you put jumper cables to a hot battery. The dead battery draws juice from the hot battery.
Well, that’s what corrosion is doing. And in doing so it’s deteriorating the grain of metal next to it. That’s what it corrosion is, is deterioration of metal. And it’s caused internally in the metal itself because each grain of metal has a different potential. It’s like shorting a battery up to a dead battery.
When you put cathodic protection on it, you apply a current to the surface of the metal and it brings the whole environment up to 0.85 volts, which is higher than any of the other potential grains of metal voltage. So, it makes them all equal so that it stops the corrosion between the grains of metal. Does that make sense?
Mark O: That’s a little bit clearer now. Yes.
Dale W: Okay. Well, in the ground, metal, metal doesn’t corrode in the air. It corrodes when it gets moisture on it. Well, buried in the ground or in water in the lake, it’s got more moisture all the time. That’s your jumper cables from one to the other. You know, one cell to the other.
Mark O: And so by corrosion we’re talking about rusting out and stuff like that, right?
Dale W: Yes. Yes. Rust
Mark O: And then so you’re talking to these people at Freese and Nichols about the cathodic protection they have at our spillways?
Dale W: Actually, Gerald, Gerald Harless was an individual consultant that worked for them as a contractor. He didn’t work for them, he just worked for them as a contractor. So, he was on his own. Well, I learned a lot from that man on cathodic protection, How it works and how to stop it. And whatnot.
Well, he suggested that we put anodes, sacrificial anodes on the pipeline, which in doing so, the sacrificial metal is the one that deteriorates. And it’s hooked to the pipe with a metal wire, copper wire. So, it deteriorates away and protects the pipe in doing so.
Mark O: Okay. And so, how did we get to the point where we knew that we wanted to install such a system on the Cedar Creek pipeline?
Dale W: There’s a chart somewhere. There’s data of number of pipelines breaks per year. And they were escalating year by year by year. That we were getting more and more. And the predominant cause was corrosion of the pipe. The pre-stressing wire that holds the pipe together. So, we had to find a way to stop that corrosion and having catastrophic failures. And that was cathodic protection.
Mark O: Okay. So can you explain, for those of us who haven’t been out to a pipeline site and seen these things get pulled out of the ground, what pre-stressed concrete pipe is? And where the metal is, right? Because you see a pipeline, it looks completely concrete. But that pre-stressed involves like a cable of steel that it kind of wraps around it. Can you explain it, probably better than I just did?
Dale W: Yeah. There’s different classes of pipe. There’s different pressure classes of pipe. I’m going to talk about it being a quarter inch wire.
Mark O: Okay.
Dale W: There’s different sizes. I know there’s going to be some people roll their eyes at this. But pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipe is a tin can that has a concrete two-inch concrete lining inside of it. It has about a two-inch concrete coating on the outside of it that was poured in a form where it’s uniform.
Then they put it in a machine, and they take this quarter inch high tensile strength wire, and they wrap it under tension. They rotate that pipe and roll this wire onto the surface of the pipe at half-inch intervals, which is like sticking your finger in a spring and trying to expand the spring outward. That’s what the wire does, is it holds it all together. Then as they wrap this wire, they spray a slurry of concrete over the top of it.
So, all you see is concrete inside and concrete outside. But there’s a lot going on underneath that concrete. Steel does not corrode in concrete. The problem is concrete does two things. It gets hard and it cracks.
When it cracks, it lets moisture into this metal. And I explained a while ago, moisture is part of the corrosion series. Moisture gets in and it starts corroding just a little bit. Well metal when it corrodes, it can grow to ten times its size. Because of the ore, reverting back to an ore.
You don’t take 1 pound of ore and make 1 pound of steel. You take 10 pounds of ore and make 1 pound of steel. So, it grows. Well, when it does, it starts popping this coating loose off the wire and just exposes more and more area to moisture. And the area gets bigger and bigger until it’s big enough that it’s hit with a surge of water, and it can’t hold it. So, it splits the pipe open. Busts open. We have catastrophic failure, then.
Mark O: And so this was happening more and more.
Dale W: Yes.
Mark O: And you enter the picture with this knowledge. How did you get this off the ground? And I know David Marshall is another guy that probably wasa cheerleader for, for this kind of stuff, after observing, you know, these catastrophic breaks. And it’s like, how do we stop this stuff?
Dale W: Back then there was very little training. We did not attend seminars. We didn’t go to training classes and this, that, and the other. So, all I could do was talk to the people that I could find to talk to about it.
And, we started, I started trying to figure out how many anodes it would take to protect a joint of pipe. And there was a lot more to it than what I could find out by the seat of my pants.
As a matter of fact, once the study was done, David Marshall came on the scene. He got a consulting firm involved. They did a study on how much current it would take to protect the pipelines. And, and, and whatnot.
We started a project in 1990, I think it was, installing anodes on Richland Pipeline and finished up with Richland and Cedar Creek in about ’95, I think. Well, during that time, it took 55,000 anodes. They were 100 pounds apiece to actually protect our pipe.
Mark O: Wow.
Dale W: They’re deteriorating now. And we’re, I understand that we’re starting to have a catastrophic failures again. But they’re, they’re moving in a different direction. They’re using a different pipe design now that holds up better over life and coating. Going from a concrete coating, I think, to a polyvinyl coating to help protect it also.
Mark O: Okay. And then so, when it comes to getting the anodes installed, obviously that’s something that took some time. How did you check the results of what you guys were doing?
Dale W: Oh, there’s test stations. I’m sure you’ve heard reference to test stations, which is a wire that’s attached to the pipe that comes through the top of the ground. Well, off of that wire, we can take what they call a copper, copper sulfate electrode, stick it to the ground. And use a voltmeter in between and use the voltage that is on the pipe as a reading. Well, with that sample reading then it will tell you if you’re in the range of being protected or not.
Mark O: Okay. And then, so one of the things, and I think this is kind of where our paths crossed initially, was filming pipeline replacement type stuff that was going down during the low water use periods in the wintertime. (Right) when they were pulling out segments. And, and so I, I did notice while we were out there, one of your key things was taking a look at the pipe that had come out of the ground, and they would break it up a little bit. And that’s where you get to see all this, this wire coming out. (Right).
And then so you’re looking for wire pieces that are like broken and counting those and all that stuff to kind of figure out whether you pulled out the right segment of pipe. Or whether that pipe needed to be pulled out in the first place. But what was your experience like doing that?
Dale W: David Marshall got us involved in a nondestructive testing study that was going on. Okay. Nondestructive testing is when a company comes in and they run a machine through the pipe. And it emits a sound wave. And a receiver receives that wave back.
As they go down through the pipe, they know what they’re looking for. If they get to an area of the pipe that has broken wire and this signal becomes broken. It’s a broken signal, which tells them you’re in a pipe that has been jeopardized. Compromised.
So they go down through there and all of these pipe joints, 20, 24-feet long, are numbered. So they know exactly where they’re at. So then during low use times during weather, like you, winter, like you mentioned, we go in and we pull these segments out.
Well, to prove or disprove whether their readings were correct or not. Then that’s when we demolish the pipe and see where the damage was. How bad the damage was from corrosion. It just gives us more data. Gives us more proof that what we’re doing is working, as far as testing for bad pipe.
There is a another technique I told you that we use. We connect to this wire that comes off the pipe and take a reading. We can also move that, that meter. Take a small gauge wire tied to it. A nd then we can string that little wire out between test stations, taking readings as we go and find any area that the potential is low. And then we know we need to go in and add anodes in that area to bring that potential back up to that protected level.
Mark O: While you’re doing that, you’re still working on the heavy, you know, overseeing the heavy equipment maintenance type stuff or…?
Dale W: Yes. I didn’t really get involved in per se, the labor of installing anodes. We had a crew that was about a 6- or 7-man crew. Each person had a job. We had a drill truck. We had a trencher. We had a backhoe. We had a dump truck. We had a box blade. At one time, like I say, I think there was six or eight guys out there. And there was 14 pieces of equipment. But each piece of equipment had a specific job.
Like, the argument one time was, you’ve got a utility tractor, it’s got a bucket on the front of it, but you got a backhoe with a bucket on the front of it. Why do you need them both? Well, one of them is, the backhoe is digging down to the pipe to connect the anodes to the pipe. And the utility tractor is backfilling anodes as they go along.
So, you got to stop one operation to go do the other one, you know. And they’re not… the backhoe tractor was one thing that was working most all of the time. Backfilling anodes was kind of contingent on drilling holes, dropping anodes in, then you start backfilling.
So yes, we had more equipment than we had people, but each piece of equipment had a job. And they overlapped so much that you couldn’t take one of them away without affecting one or two other steps in the operation.
But anyway, I didn’t get in on the labor part of it. There again, I was basically management. Overseeing it. Doing the legwork, helping order parts. Keeping supplies ahead. Keeping help hired and so on.
But at the same time, I had I had time to do these other projects also. And these other projects – the helping with maintenance on spillway gates, helping with maintenance on the valves was not a full eight-hour-a-day job. I would go to several job sites and do several different things during the day.
Mark O: And then, so were you the only one doing this stuff, or was there other people also that were in this mode? Like knowing what you did, or were you the only guy that knew what you were doing?
Dale W: Ah, Lord. David Marshall, of course, knew what I was doing exactly. As far as the Catholic protection part of it, Wesley Cleveland knew what I was doing. We kept, we kept up with each other. All of us kept up[ with each other pretty good.
Joe Weaver was the on the ground supervisor of the anode installation. And I trusted him fully. He did an excellent job on it.
Mark O: All right. Is there anything else that you would want to add about the cathodic protection? Anything that we missed?
Dale W: We missed a whole bunch.
Mark O: So we’re just scratching the surface on that, too. We were
Dale W: We were scratching the surface. Raymond Archer was a dispatcher in Fort Worth when I went to work down there and stayed there until in the ‘80s. He told me one time, he said, “everything… time is relative.”
He said, “when you’re one-year old, your life was a year old. And it was a long time. When you’re two-years old, your second year was only half of your life. When you’re five-years old, one-year is only a fifth of your life.” Long story short, everything’s relevant.
Okay. We were working. We started out on this design when David Marshall got a consultant down here. And we started doing a study on the pipeline. We started on Cedar Creek line because Cedar Creek line was the one we were having the most trouble with.
And one day it dawned on me. I said, wait a minute. We’re working on the old pipeline. This pipeline is 20-years old. We’ve got a brand new pipeline over there that’s only three-years old and, or two-years old
In two years, it will double its life. Cedar Creek Line, in one year, it’s only 1/21 older. I said, the damage has been done to Cedar Creek. We need to be working on the Richland line. It’s brand new, let’s keep it brand new. The next day, everything shifted to Richland. And we did it first and then came back to Cedar Creek line.
Mark O: That’s that seems like probably a good plan for sure.
Dale W: A lot of things that I do, I reference back to something that I have been taught, been told over the years. One other bit was, back in the early 80s, Bridgeport Lake was real low. The Mayor of Runaway Bay was giving Mr. Hickey a rash of crap about it, you know, like he had something to do with the lake being so low. Lots of different reasons. And I overheard him – the mayor say something that I knew wasn’t right.
And when I got a chance, I asked Mr. Hickey. I said, “why didn’t you set him straight? Why did… you knew that was wrong, why didn’t you set him straight?”
And he said, son, he said, I learned a long time ago… he said, “it’s best not to get in a piss fight with a skunk.” And I have taken that to heart a lot of times over the years.
Mark O: So, during this time you’re working out of the Fort Worth office for the most part?
Dale W: Yes.
Mark O: When did you make that migration back out here to Bridgeport?
Dale W: I can’t give you an exact date, but it was well after David Marshall came. His background coming from USGS or National Weather Service, USGS, whichever. He was into water management, rainfall.
He knew water. He knows water. So he wanted to install a system of, of rain gauges and stream gauges to where he would know how much rain, how much water was coming into the lake. And how much, what the crest of the flood was going to be. And he could predict it off of the equipment that we have in the field now.
Dale W: Back way up. And when Cedar Creek pipeline was going in, there was a project that they went out on the West Fork starting in Fort Worth, working their way west. One gage was it at Eagle Mountain; one was at Bridgeport. One was at Boyd. There were several of these sites that were basically piggybacked on two USGS gages. But getting the information from USGS wasn’t as easy as it is now.
But we had installed equipment at these key sites piggybacking off of their gages to where we were supposed to be able to pick up a phone… no, yeah, to pick up a phone… a computer could call these sites and get a reading from them. And it didn’t work because, at that time, all phone systems were analog. They were designed to operate off of the shortest distance from Fort Worth to Boyd. And it always, didn’t always happen.
The switchboard may take them through Brownwood and back around, back to Boyd. And it was too many switch interchanges for this to work. So, it was abandoned.
When I got involved, that was in, in the late ‘60s. Okay. When I got involved with it heavily, was in the early ‘70s. And I went to National Weather Service and I said, “is there some piece of equipment we can get to the interface between these gages?” Because they all had phone lines going to them.
And I met a fellow there that was a great help. And he said, “yeah, we’ve got a little box back here that we’ve quit using. We’ve upgraded, but we’ve quit using these.” And he said, “you take these out an interface between USGS equipment and your phone line, and you can call it. And you count the beeps.”
It was a rotating drum type thing. There were several drums. This one turns ten times. This one turns one. This one turns ten times. This one turns one.
So you listen to it. Then a micro switch ran across them and you counted the beeps. And it would tell you exactly what the gage reading was at that time.
Mark O: And this is gauge reading for rainfall and streamflow?
Dale W: This this was for stream.
Mark O: Okay.
Dale W: Uh, river height.
Mark O: Okay.
Dale W: Before that we had people sitting in pickups at Boyd, at Marietta on the upper end Bridgeport. It wasn’t so bad here because they could get to a telephone here. But when they were sitting out on a bridge like that, you may have to drive five miles to get on top of a hill, to radio it back to Fort Worth then. And this was every hour, 24-hours a day while a flood was going on.
Well, with this phone system in place, then Raymond Archer in Fort Worth could pick up phone, dial a gauge, and see what level it was.
So, when David Marshall came in, then he started upgrading this system and also adding rain gauges. Now, I don’t think you could ever call them on a telephone after that. But they came in on computer. And you can get on the computer and look at all of the gauge readings now.
That was a multi-year project there – going out finding landowners that were willing to let us put up rain gauges on their property and, and whatnot. And I did all of that legwork.
And, at that time, it was line of sight radio, I had one gauge up close to Bowie that had to take seven radio hops to get back to Fort Worth to get line of sight from hill to hill to hill to hill, you know.
Mark O: Right.
Dale W: And relay it back to Fort Worth. So, that was, that kept me busy. Maintaining those. It’ss good equipment. Very seldom anything can go wrong with it. But there was things that went wrong
Mark O: And it’s probably good thing that, that they had you to be able to go out there and deal with it in a relatively, quick time frame.
Dale W: Right. Yeah. At one time I actually had 41 gauges switch that stretch from Antelope up by Wichita Falls down to… I can’t remember the name of the little town down by Hillsboro, and over to Canton. So I had rain gauges scattered, rain gauges, stream gages scattered in that area.
Mark O: So that seems to be like a project that that gets accomplished over a series of years and not necessarily, like we’re going to get this in a couple of months kind of thing.
Dale W: No, it wasn’t a couple of months. It was, it took several years. Yeah.
Mark O: Yeah. And now I’m assuming that, that the information that these things are still collecting, right?
Dale W: Yes. Yes.
Mark O: That that helps our engineering department assess how much flow is coming into the reservoirs. And, and how quickly it’s going to fill the reservoirs. And at what point they need to start opening gates? And…
Dale W: Yes.
Mark O: And how much they need to open those gates?
Dale W: How much they need open gates, right. I mentioned earlier, Bridgeport was 35-feet low. It was ‘80,’ 81, ‘82. Somewhere along in there. And it started raining. And Bridgeport filled up and went one-foot over spillway. It filled up 36-feet.
But at the same time, Eagle Mountain went eight-foot over spillway. And in a week’s time, they released enough water out of Eagle Mountain to fill Eagle Mountain two and a half times. And all of that was Eagle Mountain watershed water. Not a drop of it came out of Bridgeport.
They held that one-foot here until Eagle Mountain went back down. Then they fed it in. That fed that one-foot in and got rid of it.
Mark O: So how quickly did it fill that 30-something-feet?
Dale W: It was, it was a week. Within a week it filled at 36-foot.
Mark O: That’s amazing. What a turn of events, right?
Dale W: Yeah. And that same time they were fighting that flood at Eagle Mountain, which was eight-foot over spillway.
Mark O: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a it’s a lot of kind of coordinating between those waters stored, the reservoirs…
Dale W: Right.
Mark O: And making sure you’re not dumping from one into another and just making things worse.
Dale W: Right. The water district is unique in the fact that we, I say we the water district, can dump floodwater. You look on the news during flood and whatever, Lake Lewisville, all of these lights around here are filled up. Their marinas are flooded. And they’re sitting there holding it because they can’t release floodwater.
They have to wait until the river goes back down, and then they coordinate their water in, to keep from being another flood, you know, down the river right behind the flood that just happened.
Mark O: Right.
Dale W: So, that’s why it takes those Dallas lakes and whatnot so long to go back down, is because they have to slow release it. Where we can dump, anytime it goes over spillway we can dump floodwater.
Mark O: Yeah, and we’re further upstream than the Dallas people. So, I guess that that helps with getting, giving us the opportunity to release first in a way?
Dale W: Yeah. But it’s it’s our, it’s whatever you want to call the water district, water district is not… we operate under USGS rules, but we’re not ruled, we’re not managed by USGS, which all these other lakes are.
Benbrook is one of them that has to hold floodwater until it’s safe to release it.
Mark O: So, cathodic protection and stream gage installation. Heavy equipment maintenance. What else did you got going on, because I’m sure that still just scratches the surface?
Dale W: I just, I always felt like I’m everybody’s boss and everybody is my boss. Anybody that needs anything can tell me what they need done. If I see something wrong, then I can tell them it’s wrong.
That might be the wrong thing to say. Might be the wrong position to have. But that’s the way I’ve always been. If I see somebody struggling, I’m going to help them. If I see somebody doing something wrong, I going to tell them how to do it better.
Mark O: You know in the end, it just makes them better at what they’re doing, right?
Dale W: Correct. Yeah.
Mark O: Yeah, that’s pretty cool. So, as I understand it, also, there were some things that you were involved with, with old drilling equipment that you ended up helping people from, I guess it was Central America or something…
Dale W: Bolivia.
Mark O: Bolivia. Okay, so…
Dale W: By La Paz, Bolivia.
Mark O: So we’re talking South America.
Dale W: Yeah. Jason Gehrig got me involved with those people. They came up here and, I trained them how to run a waterwell drill rig, which is one of my sideline businesses.
Eventually, they got a truck and got it shipped down there. And then I went down to Bolivia for a week and helped them learn how to run the truck. We actually drilled a couple of wells while I was down there.
Yeah. And if you’ve never been in this situation, it’s different. Where Jason is the only English voice I heard while I was down there for a week. I do a lot of hand signals and grunting and pointing. And that’s, that’s the way we got along down there… is I would, I just absolutely had to show them what to do, you know, and try to explain to them through actions what was going on. And Jason interpreted the best he could, this old country boy’s talk, to them.
We, we pulled up on one site. And they had a well, maybe a half-mile away in this valley. And they said, “we can’t drink; you can’t use the water.”
And I said, “well, what’s wrong?” And they took me over to a well house and opened the door, and it was rust stain inside that well house like you wouldn’t believe.
So, we went over and we started drilling this other well. And in fact, we were digging a pit to drill, circulate our drill mud out of. And I looked at that and I said, “there’s your problem.”
The first three feet of that land looked like when you dig up nails in the yard and the ground is rusty around the nail. That’s the way it looked like. It was just a solid bed of nails and rust.
And I said, “there’s your problem.” And I said, “I think we can fix that.”
So, we went ahead and drilled a well. Got casing in it. And I heard back from them, I think it was a couple of months later. And they said that was pristine water because of the way I showed them to seal it off.
You drilled the well. You put casing in it. You put pea gravel and bottom of it, and then you concrete the annulus, outside the casing to where no surface contamination can get down into that water. And they said that was pristine water coming out of that well that we drilled.
Mark O: That is awesome. And then, so where was the source of all this corrosive stuff?
Dale W: I have no idea. Bolivia. Bolivia is one of those countries you have to kind of read between the lines. You see, South America, they talk about hydraulic mining where they go in and they wash these hills away.
Well, all of the surface water down these valleys from those mines like that, not only the hydraulic mining, but in the way they extract the gold or other precious metals out of it, they could use mercury. Well, the mercury goes into the streams. But all of the surface water in these valleys where we were at was contaminated.
It stunk. I mean, the whole valley stunk from that water running down through the streams. So, where that actual contamination came from, I don’t know. I don’t even know when it happened. You know, it could have been a hundred years ago that it flooded that down through there.
Mark O: So that’s, that’s uh… helping people like that get access to clean, pristine water (right), Is probably a pretty, pretty good feeling.
Dale W: It is. It really is. They, they were super people, super nice people. And, I was proud to be able to help them.
Mark O: That’s that’s really neat. So, other than what we’ve talked about, are there any additional stories that you would like to share with us about your life here at TRWD?
Dale W: It has, it’s been a dream job. I’ve gotten to do things that I would have never thought possible for me growing up to be able to do. And just the simple things, you know.
The freedom that we had. I can’t speak for now. But the freedom you, your job was what you made of it. You could, you could have a bad job, or you could make it a good job. And the supervision appreciated it. And they rewarded you for doing a good job.
Like I say, I go… when I first went Fort Worth, the first year or two I was in there, when I wasn’t running equipment. I could, go to the welding shop. I could weld. I could go to the paint shop, and I could learn about painting equipment, you know. We worked on boats. I got to work on lake patrol boats and learn different things about them.
It’s really been good. I have, I have thoroughly enjoyed it.
Mark O: That’s awesome. And I’m guessing that some of these things you learned are not things that you kept to yourself. That you shared, shared what you learned with others and the people coming behind you.
Dale W: I love to teach people. I love… if they’re serious about learning something and I know something, I’m gonna teach it to them. Because I always felt like that was part of my job, too, is to pass on the knowledge of how to do it. How this should be done. How this should be maintained.
It may be the easiest way to do it; may not be the easiest way to do it. But there’s a reason that I do it that way, and I’d like to share that with them.
Mark O: That’s great because… you’ve been here for decades, and there’s always people that are going to come up from, you know, filling, filling in the, the shoes that you left behind or whatever. And, being able to pass, pass down the information and knowledge is so important so that these guys don’t feel lost, you know, when they get here.
So, what kind of advice would you give people that just start showing up, or that just now got hired and maybe they’ve been here for, you know, a few months, a year, not quite two years. What kind of advice would you give to those folks?
Dale W: Do the job that you’re asked to do and do it better than what you’ve been asked to do. Learn. Ask what the guy next you is doing. Why is he doing it like that, you know? Make the job what you want it to be. Because most people are up for improvement, suggestions.
I’ve also found that, that the ones that are not team players usually don’t stay very long. People that are, that are willing to share, willing to teach, willing to help, are usually the ones that wind up staying around.
Look at the tenure here. The people that have been here more than 30 years, you know. It’s unheard of.
Mark O: All right. So, I guess with that, Dale, if, if you don’t have anything else to share, that we’re going to, we’re going to wrap it up.
Dale W: I got one, one more thing.
Mark O: He’s got a lot of notes over there, folks.
Dale W: I got a lot of notes. Take me a minute to find it,
While I’m looking. Is there anything else you’d like talked about?
Mark O: I’m leaving that up to you.
Dale W: (more searching through notes) I know it’s here somewhere.
Dale W: I’ve seen lots of changes at the water district over the years. Most of them have been very good. I’ve met a lot of super nice people over the years. Made some good friends. And I’m proud of that fact.
Dale W: Okay. I found what I was looking for in my notes. And the one thing I want to do. I want to thank everybody that I’ve worked with through the years. I have thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ve learned a lot from everyone. I think, hope I’ve taught people what they needed to know from me.
One thing I do want to include is I want to congratulate my granddaughter, Lillian Cring, for winning first place for the photo that she submitted for the 8th through 12th grade, TRWD Earth Day photo contest, awarded April 22nd of ‘24.
That pretty much wraps it up.
Mark O: Well, Dale, I certainly appreciate your time. I know that the contributions that you’ve made here at the water district, although they may not be visible on the surface, are definitely things that have lasting impacts with, with me and with many of the other people that you’ve crossed paths with here.
And so, I really appreciate you joining us for this episode and wish you the best of luck in anything that, that you got going on in your life.
Dale W: Well, thank you very much.
